Linghun by Ai Jiang
Publisher - Dark Matter INK
Published - Out Now
Price - £11.99 paperback £5.69 Kindle eBook
From acclaimed author Ai Jiang, follow Wenqi, Liam, and Mrs. to the mysterious town of HOME, a place where the dead live again as spirits, conjured by the grief-sick population that refuses to let go. This edition includes a foreword by Yi Izzy Yu, Translator of The Shadow Book of Ji Yun, the essay "A Ramble on Di Fu Ling & Death" by the author, and two bonus short stories from Jiang: "Yǒngshí" and "Teeter Totter."
Grief is a powerful emotion. The loss of people we love is unimaginable; something we all have to face and worst of all we will return to it again and again as people we care about pass. It is both an incredibly human reaction and yet one that feels counter to everything we thing we should be. It has a power that is very hard to escape. In Ai Jiang’s stunning novella Linghun we see that in action as a young teenager and her family arrive in a mysterious town where the dead are ever present but the impact on the living is the hardest of all to face.
Wenqi arrives with her Mum and Dad after paying a lot of money to arrive in the Canadian town of HOME. They hope they can soon meet Wenqi’s older brother who died many years ago. HOME stands for Homecoming of Missing Entities - if you can have a house here (and property in HOME because of this is expensive) then your lost ones will return every day to allow you to experience them again - find either escape or for many this means you will never leave. Wenqi finds day to day existing stagnant and only finds one bond with a teenager called Liam who is a Lingerer one of the people who live on the streets of HOME waiting for a chance to buy a house. Under the watch of a neighbour who has stayed here so long no one knows her name Wenqi and Liam discover common interests but family secrets may pull them apart.
This is compelling read from the first chapter a strange modern gothic tale of loss and people trying to escape it and for some enter forever into it. The idea of HOME is brilliant if people knew they could see their loved ones again wouldn’t many people want to come and typically in our world wouldn’t capitalism try to use that for every penny it can get? HOME is a magnet for the vulnerable and watching the streets crowded with people waiting for a house to arrive is chilling for many reasons as the story progresses.
Our main character Wenqi is very ambivalent about HOME and watching how her family are sucked into it is painful to watch. Wenqi has always felt second in family affetion and how her brother’s ghost is back we see she is very much again ignored, forgotten about or just told to play along. Her scenes are very much about how family grief can hurt the ones around us. Hearing how her mother even ignores her birthdays is heartrending. Its also sinister that for Wenqi she is not quite seeing the same face as her parents do. Its never fully explained what HOME is and that ambivalence over the ghsost we hear about adds to the fear that this place is not right.
Just as Wenqi’s family is stuck in their grief then the whole town of HOME feels wrong. The school is falling to pieces; very little pride in the place is taken and books and classes are all teaching subjects years out of date. The metaphor for being stuck in the past is huge and continues throughout to get more and more suffocating. HOME leeches people’s love, happiness, health and money. In Liam’s storyline we see this as he lives on the streets as one fed grey sludge never proper food and his family only want a house to come up. In a chilling scene we get to witness what that actually results in when the rich estate agent puts a house up for sale and we see how the Lingerers fight without any morality for a chance to bid. Grief here is a destructive force and is being preyed on for profit. As Wenqi and Liam bond we find these two plotlines ultimately collide in an unexpected way and the question for these two is can you ever escape grief for long? When we finally have scenes set outside of HOME we feel both joy at having noise and life again but aware that mortality is always ticking too
As a cautionary storyline we meet the woman only known as Mrs. She is a Chinese mail order bride whose husband passes years ago and she has never left. She is unique in never seeing her husband’s ghost despite living there. For Mrs. her grief is an eternal waiting game being frozen in amber and never moving on. I loved how this story made this woman’s life slowly reveal itself and we see her an an individual not a figure of cruel fun for those who live in HOME. She cleverly bookends the book’s final tragic scenes that suggest the cycle of HOME never truly ends we can only get a brief respite.
Linghun is a brilliant supernatural tale with moments of horror human and supernatural but its cleverly explores this most dangerous of emotions and what it can do to us and those we care about. A strongly recommended read and a writer to watch out for.
