Nothing But Blackened Teeth and the Accumulation of Horror
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In Cassandra Khaw's Nothing But Blackened Teeth, a group of friends fly to Japan to party in an ancient haunted house and, well, things get really bad.
In the first chapter, we learn about the characters' complicated pasts, as well as the truly terrifying story of the house's ghost: a thousand years ago, a bride was buried alive then required a yearly human sacrifice. The writer is setting the scene and building anticipation, an important step in a ghost story, but we don't yet meet the ghost herself.
What we do get is the barely heard, but easily dismissed, sound of the ghost's voice, and some lovely imagery:
A whisper, so quiet the cerebellum wouldn't acknowledge its receipt. The words were drowned by the reverb of Faiz's voice calling, an afterimage, an impression of teeth on skin. We exited the room, the future falling into place behind us. Like a wedding veil, a mourning caul. Like froth on the lip of a bride drowning on soil.
First, the idea of a sensation that won't implant occurs in a few places in this book and is important. It's a different way of knowing something and creates the frustratingly slippery and terrifying sense of something that exists beyond the usual methods of perception.
But what I'm most interested in are those last two sentences: "Like a wedding veil, a mourning caul. Like froth on the lip of a bride drowning on soil." These are gorgeous images, but what are they doing?
First, the objects and substances are not physically present but mentioned as a comparison to something else. In this case the something else is the future and the way it falls into place, softly drifting downward like the caul and the veil and the soil.
In my first (incorrect) read, I also thought these gauzy, fizzy images were about the sound of the ghost's voice and how the brain refused to fully register it. In a synesthetic way, these images make sense for understanding that. They are fluttery and infirm; their mistiness reflects the sound's evasiveness.
But of course they are more than either of these similes. They are also visual and textural images of a ghost who hasn't yet become visible or taken on physical texture in the story or to the narrator. Are they supernatural visions then? Not quite. They come from the active imagination (and sensibility) of a person who has every reason to conjure them.
However, to a reader, a "real" image operates in the same way as an imagined or metaphorical one. We may dismiss it once we understand its purpose in the story (in this case, that we're ostensibly only supposed to note the cascading motion), but the image of wedding veil, mourning caul, frothy lip, and soil-filled mouth impress on us before they release. It's fleeting, but it happens.
Kind of like that ghost voice, right? And very much like an actual ghost. We sense something but then it is gone and did we really? An impression remains, but it is indefinable.
This imagery obviously gives us what many would call foreshadowing, but I want to dig in more specifically to how it operates for the reader.
A ghost story almost always wants to build slowly toward horror. Horror, after all, is a sensation that can be lost very quickly. Once the very worst thing has actually happened, we shift into misery or perhaps resignation. The writer must be careful then to be constantly moving toward whatever is most dreadful without reaching the worst of it too quickly.
Ghosting an image in this way--giving us a picture, then snatching it back--is a very useful technique in this regard. It's a way to almost-show the actual ghost but also hold off a bit longer, thus sustaining the suspense so the horror can magnify.
It's also a way to build depth and richness in the ghost herself. Because of the necessarily quick transition from horror to resignation, there's simply not time in that split second of a ghost's most extreme manifestation to detail every fang (or in this case the black teeth, the red mouth, the smooth face with no features). But in order for the horror to be at its most intense, we do have to know those details. Our brain has to go there.
And so Khaw has taken special care to plant these details throughout the book. They build suspense, sure. But they also accumulate in the reader's mind, so that a frenzy of rich and horrific detail pours on us all at once in that final perfect moment of horror. (Which I am NOT going to spoil for you!)