Sinophagia: A Celebration of Chinese Horror 2024

Thanks so much to NetGalley, Solaris, and Tantor audio for the ARC. The narration by both Emily Woo Zeller and David Lee Huynh were great!

This is a celebration of all things Chinese horror, which is fantastic. As this is audio, and I was listening at work without accompanying text, it was hard to note any of the story titles themselves, as they were in Chinese! But there were a few that stood out to me. The editor does a great job of adding notes and translations, however how some of them would pop up as footnotes right in the audio did add a slight layer of confusion for me, as they would repeat the Chinese phrase multiple times before commenting on it. It’s both necessary to define the terms used, but also took me out of the stories a lot.

One story that stood out was a mixture of ghost story, as well as a commentary on the pricing crisis on land that’s happening. An entire housing complex, which our main characters were not aware of when moving in, is mostly being used to house the ashes of the dead. While awake one night, a boyfriend finds a coin in the mouth of his girlfriend, a token used to help the dead. He freaks out and of course they desire to move. The twist that followed was not one I was expecting, and it was well done for something so short. The commentary on land, taking care of loved ones, and placing them to rest, reminded me of this year’s Korean film Exhuma.

Another I particularly enjoyed found a man and woman waking up inside an apartment. With no way out, they are trapped, and as their kidnapper knocked them out, they don’t even know where. Through various phone calls, the person on the other line offers them ways out through various tasks or tricks. I listened to this story right after watching Saw II and the comparisons cannot be understated. While there are no contraptions, the life and death possibility of being trapped, as well as the choices to save each other, does have a kind of Jigsaw feel with the person on the other end of the line. It also feels very reminiscent of those earlier 2000s movies where all the trapped person has is a phone.

Otherwise, with this being kind of mixed, as it includes short stories, novelettes, and novellas, I did struggle a bit with the different lengths, as sometimes I’d get used to a specific voice and then the story would promptly end. Then you’d start all over. I feel like collections of all shorts are a bit easier, but there were none that I disliked! As the editor notes several times throughout, some of these were what would be considered very Classical Chinese horror…which kind of felt like differing stories with the same ending of, “they were dead the whole time!” Not really displeasing, but I think it’s why I enjoyed the ones that differed the most.