In one of those odd occurrences where a literary world and the real world seem to merge, I began reading Kim Fu’s new novel, The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts, while a series of “atmospheric rivers” was passing over the Pacific Northwest. The book’s main setting can be summarized in one word: rain. Not a light or short-lived rain but a heavy, continuous, becomes-an-antagonist rain. If cloudy skies and wet weather are de rigueur in Northwest literature, Fu has given us the ultimate Northwest book.
The rain matters in Fu’s story because her main character, Eleanor Fan, a therapist who works with online clients, has just lost her mother, Lele, and in deference to Lele’s deathbed wish, buys a house. The only decent house she can afford near the Northwest city she lives in is a former model home in an unfinished development where, as soon as she moves in, the rain does too. Before long, she discovers the first of what we might call watery intrusions.
Every Northwest homeowner worries about leaks, especially in the winter when the rain seems endless. But there are leaks and then there are leaks—from poorly sealed windows, missing flashing, questionable skylights. Leaks that bring with them the fear of dry rot, swollen drywall, black mold. Eleanor could give you a full list.
But there is more going on in Fu’s increasingly frightening novel than wet weather. Those ghosts in the title, for example. The first to appear is Lele, who, before her death, dedicated herself to doing everything for Eleanor, including making her decisions for her. Whether she is real or a figment of Eleanor’s imagination isn’t clear. Either way, she isn’t much help anymore, except as a reminder of what Eleanor lacks in competence, experience, and knowledge of how the world works.
Buried in Eleanor’s memory is a less-benign specter, a graduate-school mentor who crossed a line, leaving her susceptible to her mother’s overbearing ways and doubts about her ability to help her clients. The clients are ghostly too. Their onscreen images waver due to Eleanor’s weak Wi-Fi and they often disappear after a session or two, leaving their problems and images in Eleanor’s mind, unresolved.
Then there’s the story she learns about the man who hired dozens of locals to carve his development out of a virgin forest-filled valley—cutting down trees, laying foundations—before his work was cut short.
As workmen arrive to help Eleanor deal with the man’s shoddy workmanship and dark legacy, she begins to feel more and more vulnerable in the isolated house. The question that deepens along with the dread is whether anything in this situation is salvageable, including Eleanor herself.
“Eleanor woke to a short, sharp clang that rose above the racket of the drying machines, the rain, the cotton plugs in her ears. She would later realize the sound marked the end of the rattling in the kitchen–whatever was broken inside the exhaust fan had finally been torn free by the wind, clanking as it landed inside the metal air shaft. Into this muffled soundscape, her mind added the TV show theme from her childhood: Now you know how the world works. Now you know how the world works! Like everyone else, she was doomed to dream the dreams of the man who built her house, the men who ruled the world.”
page 161
Kim Fu is one of the most interesting, inventive, and masterly writers working in the Northwest today. The author of two previous novels (For Today I Am a Boy and The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore), a poetry collection (How Festive the Ambulance), and a brilliant book of short stories (Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century) that won both a Pacific Northwest Book Award and a Washington State Book Award, their writing is smooth, beautiful, and precise. Highly imaginative and unpredictable (in the best ways) too.
In The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts, they’ve crafted a taut tale that grows progressively more tense until you start looking over your own shoulder for ghosts—or leaks. Yet the story is more than a ghost story or cautionary tale about the dangers of buying a house. Without pausing or even slowing their narrative, Fu touches upon important issues: the legacy of abuse, the proper role of parenting, the relationship between our callous destruction of nature and our treatment of human beings, and our growing lack of meaningful relationships.
With its foreboding view of the world America’s younger generations are inheriting, an alternative title might have been A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.
Kim Fu will be the featured author in the Cascadia Writers-in-Conversation Series in Edmonds, WA, at 6 p.m. on Thursday, January 8. For details and tickets, click here.
The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts by Kim Fu will be published by Tin House Books on March 3, 2026. You can preorder a copy now by clicking below:
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