Nothing but Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I did not like this. Thankfully, it is a mercifully short novella, but I disliked it so much that it took me forever and a day to finish. The one pro was the Japanese folklore (always guaranteed to please Certified Weeb Trash like myself). Everything else was lousy.

Nothing but Blackened Teeth is filled with purple prose—more interested in showing off the author’s extensive vocabulary than telling a decent story (the first and last paragraphs of this review say it best). Worse yet, all the characters are detestable. They’re supposedly friends despite seemingly loathing each other and expressing nothing but outward contempt. In my opinion, readers receive no plausible explanation for why these people would choose to spend time together. It seemed like they were only there to see who could best play the role of human garbage. I was unable to spare an ounce of sympathy for a single one of them, including the annoyingly judgmental narrator. In all fairness, I believe it was an intentional choice for the characters to be the most terrifying aspect of the book; this seems to occur fairly often in horror stories to point out that nothing is scarier than humans. However, they seem so exaggeratedly horrid and unrelatable that it makes the plot feel pointless, dumb, and like it never should have happened in the first place. It is as if the author noted that a good story has dramatically flawed characters and responded with, “Well if I make everyone completely insufferable, that MUST make it the best thing ever written.” Not.

Glad this is over.

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𝓟.𝓢. This review was crossposted from Goodreads because it contains actual thoughts rather than a typically facetious single-sentence remark. View all my book ratings and pointless takes on Goodreads or The StoryGraph.