The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts and Purposeful Ambiguity
Kim Fu’s novel, The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts, follows Eleanor, a grieving online therapist who buys a strange model home in an isolated valley where all other development has stopped short. In one of my favorite traditions of ghost stories, one that sets us up slowly and deliciously for the horrors to come, we get her slow and atmospheric arrival to this place that we’re sure will be haunted. In the meantime, Fu fills in details about Eleanor’s life, and especially her relationship with her mother, Lele, who has recently died.
And so we’re perfectly primed to meet the ghost of Lele, near the end of chapter 4.
A hand slipped into Eleanor’s under the duvet.
Small, bony. Callused fingers, but preternaturally soft along the thin skin of the back, from the hand cream Lele had kept in her purse and beside every sink, applied a dozen times a day.
Lele lay beside her, flat on her back. She wore the cotton pajamas she’d died in, buttoned to the collar and densely patterned with orange flowers, each bloom the size of a fingernail. Her grip was loose and limp. Lele turned just her head toward Eleanor, smiling—a mischievous, impish grin she’d never worn in life.
That hand is terrifying. I love how we linger on it for a moment, before it connects to a body, before it connects, specifically, to Lele’s body. Or is it her body?
The important thing is not knowing the certain truth of what she is, but that we’re in fully inside the experience with Eleanor. The sensory details make the moment vivid. We can feel Lele’s callused fingers and soft skin, smell her hand cream, snuggle against her pajama-ed body, and see her impish grin—even if we can’t yet guess what she really is or know her intentions.
And note that many of the details are about texture—the bones, callouses, “soft along the thick skin of the back,” cotton pajamas, a grip that is “loose and limp.” Even saying “buttoned” instead of “buttons” makes me feel them in my fingers instead of only seeing them. So Lele is not a bodiless apparition; she has materiality.
The details also give us a mix of comfort and death. The “preternatural” softness is an obvious example. It’s not uncommon to describe a living hand as bony, but since we know Lele is dead, we think also of exposed bone. The reader’s movement through the passage matters in this regard, too. We hit against hard details of death—the terror of an unexpected hand, the bones, the preternatural essence of it all. But we’re then lulled back to comfort with the routine and mundanity of hand cream, a daily routine, familiar cotton pajamas, a floral print. We land, finally, at the smile, which should be comforting too—but this one, “never worn in life,” is very much not. These contradictory details evoke the uncanny—a tingle of unease when something resembles what is safe and known but is not actually that thing.
The passage is followed by Eleanor’s rationalizations, a paragraph of all the ways she has imagined her mother’s presence since her death.
We land at the following:
You’re not my mother, she thought, the knowledge immediate, reflexive. But of course it wasn’t. It was a pleasant, lucid-feeling dream, something Eleanor made for herself. A housewarming gift from her own mind.
I can’t help noticing “it” in the second and third sentences. The phrase “who is it?” is common enough, even when we know there is a person rather than an “it” at the door. And I understand that Eleanor has shifted from considering the “she” of her mother into the “it” of the experience. But I still find it startling, in this moment, for Eleanor to start by addressing her mother, and end up by dismissing “it”, as if she’s rationalizing away even the personhood of the figure she sees and feels beside her. And so is this a person? A ghost? A fantasy?
We’re not meant to fully understand what is happening yet, but Eleanor is still trying to interpret it. And she does so in a way that intensifies the mystery rather than solving it. “You’re not my mother” sends us hard in the direction of terror. This could be something really bad. But right next to that, there is a more comforting explanation: a pleasant dream. And there’s one more perspective to consider, which is the reader’s take on Eleanor’s mental and emotional state. Is it ok for her to be imagining her dead mother with such material clarity?
Eleanor’s interpretation of Lele—the way we get more than one distinct theory—is purposeful ambiguity. In this case, it certainly builds from the uncanny in the earlier description, but it’s about more than inspiring chills.
From a functional perspective, it’s very smart. We need to believe that the character can brush aside or rationalize what we’ve glimpsed. We need to believe that Eleanor would choose to remain in this situation, even as our terror for her builds.
But the ambiguity also feeds the reader’s imagination in a way that vagueness would not. Instead of a blank unknowing, we can hold distinct but contradictory possibilities in our minds. We can experience vivid sensory images of the different potential explanations—the comforting and the terrifying. And they come alive in the tension between them.
We don’t need to know—at least not yet!—what is truly happening, but when we glimpse a possibility, even an uncertain one, we can have the imaginative experience of that possibility. And as multiple possibilities co-exist, we can sit in the space between them to understand a mystery that is alive and tangible—that sparks our imagination.