Book Review: She Is a Haunting by Trang Thanh Tran

 

She Is a Haunting by Trang Thanh Tran

352 pages, hardcover

February 2023 Bloomsbury YA

Let’s hear it for modern marketing. This was an impulse hold at the library after seeing an ad on Goodreads. I saw the title and the cover. That’s it. Sold. My library had it so I went in knowing nothing but the title. So unlike many of my retro reviews, I can’t give you the history of the author. I know they live in Georgia and is part of a small but growing number of genre recently published from the Vietnamese Diaspora, much like two years ago when I accidentally read three Nigerian American SF novels in a row I have read a few of these by accident. The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo and In the Watchful City by S. Qiouyi Lu are the ones that come to mind.

This novel by Trang Thanh Tran is a pure horror novel and pretty damn solid for a debut novel. Part of the purity of this novel is that it is solidly in one sub-genre - the haunted house novel. I certainly wasn’t surprised even though I went in cold because haunting is in the title. I personally love when an author brings their unique personality to a tried-and-true genre trope. Yes, there are a Buzillion haunted house novels. There are a couple of ways to make the old new again. Multiple Bram Stoker Award-winning author Lisa Morton set hers in an off-the-beat old theater in the Castle of  Los Angeles, but all the tropes were there spun differently. I tried my hand at it in my novel Punk Rock Ghost Story by having a haunted punk rock tour van. The most famous example is The Shining which put the haunted house in an enormous isolated hotel.

She is a Haunting draws on the author’s family experience (fictionalized of course) to put the haunting in a unique spot. A bed and breakfast in the Vietnamese countryside. According to the notes the author was dealing with the loss of a parent in 2020 when this was written. I dealt with the same around that time and the ups and downs of the feelings of family and grief are really strong in these pages.

From the opening pages Jade Nguyen our POV on the story has a complicated relationship with her family. The emotional depth carried in her interactions leaps off the page. She has just over a month to play happy family member with her father who left their family in Philadelphia to return to Vietnam and restore a French colonial house into that bed and Breakfast. Jade just wants to do enough for her father (through building a website for the house) to get his money for college. There is an interesting dynamic between her sister Lily and her mother who clearly still loves her father. 

The characters are one of the things that set this novel apart. It also playfully works the tropes. Once Jade experiences the haunting in the house, she has trouble being taken seriously.

“I do not use, “I think” or “probably’ or “Maybe.” Those words grow doubt. Her eyes don’t leave mine as she reads me. Maybe she perceives me as Ba does – paranoid, imaginative, a liar. I’m at least two of those things on most occasions, but this isn’t one of them. My jaw aches from the tension of grinding teeth.”

A haunted house novel is built not two important things the POV characters' inability to escape or process the supernatural events happening to them. Jade has to try and make it work, even when she feels the house is eating her alive. All excellently expressed in a dream sequence on page 183.

“You didn’t need a dad anymore,” says Ba. I mistake him for a crying man before he yanks at the end of a thin wiggling worm.
My breathing stills, but every cell in my screams to run away.

The moments of horror are well written, and there is plenty of build-up and dread before it all comes out.

“Haunted Ma Qui. Hungry ghost.
By then, maybe she and the house weren’t so different in Nature.”

I have said lots of positives. When reviewing books, I often talk myself into liking a book more than when I was reading it. There is a lot to like here. At the same time, I thought it was about 30 or 40 pages too long. I know I like bare-bones prose, I just found myself skipping paragraphs a bit here and there. I just feel this story could have come in around 270 pages. It is a debut novel. I am overall positive and Trang Thanh Tran is an author now on my radar.