Review: Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw

Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I was provided an ARC of this book via Netgalley, however I did end up listening to the final published copy of the audiobook. This book is fairly short regardless of the medium you choose to consume it in, the audiobook is around 2.5 hours and the book comes in around 130 pages depending on the edition. I enjoyed the narrator, I thought she did a good job with this creepy story.

Because this is on the shorter side, we don't get alot of background information on the characters or the lore connected with the story itself. I was drawn to read this because it was supposed to be "steeped in Japanese folklore", which having read some other books recently about that subject it is really fascinating. This doesn't go into much detail on the lore. I felt like you had to go in either understanding the lore or not wanting alot of detail on what a Yokai are and what their significance are to the story.

This follows a group of friends as they gather in a creepy old mansion for a destination wedding. The bride apparently always wanted to get married in a haunted house, and we all know brides get the weddings of their dreams, right? Well in this case she does because on of the members of the party is disgustingly wealthy and rents the mansion for the wedding. The mansion has a creepy ghost story attached to it about it's own tragic bride to be. The ghost story is actually why they picked the mansion because the "destination" part of the wedding is ghost hunting. As you can imagine things kind of start to go south as the house has it's own agenda and starts to inject terrifying things into what they thought was going to be a happy occasion. I won't spoil the rest.

I think if you liked The Haunting of Hill House, you might like this. It is more descriptive when it comes to the gore and entities. I thought it was entertaining enough, but something was missing for me. I think I wanted more, but because this was more of a novella length book we didn't get all of the details we would have in a full length novel.

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