\u201cAt first glance,\u201d thinks Eleanor, the anxious millennial protagonist from Seattle author Kim Fu\u2019s new novel, \u201cThe Valley of Vengeful Ghosts\u201d (out March 3 from Tin House), \u201cshe thought it was a logging clear-cut, a vast trapezoid of razed land\u2026 The total surgical annihilation was stunning, an environmentalist\u2019s nightmare \u2014 the ground scraped clean of the ancient trees and everything that had sheltered within, sterile as salted earth.\u201d<\/p>\n
This \u201cvast trapezoid\u201d is an unfinished housing development in the fictional Pacific Northwest town of Bering Rock, on the outskirts of a major city that Fu calls \u201cSeattle, but in a dream.\u201d Eleanor, the star of the book, has recently lost her mother. Alone for the first time in her life, struggling to navigate adulthood and her career as a therapist, she uses her inheritance to buy a house in the exurbs, honoring her mom\u2019s final wish. Then the rain starts, triggering a downward spiral for which Eleanor and her new home are equally unprepared.<\/p>\n
Fu\u2019s previous work, the short story collection \u201cLesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century,\u201d took home the Washington State Book Award for fiction in 2023 and was named a finalist for the horror-centric Shirley Jackson Awards. Fu\u2019s new novel veers similarly into horror and psychological instability. But in \u201cThe Valley of Vengeful Ghosts,\u201d the chief scare is terrifically on point: buying a home.<\/p>\n
The Seattle Times sat down with Fu to chat about their new novel shortly before its publication. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n
This book is right in the middle of a few genres, but we get a tremendous cliffhanger in the prologue. \u201cIf only, that first day Eleanor saw the house, she\u2019d hesitated longer\u2026 If only she\u2019d never come at all.\u201d This line feels like the discovery of a body in a thriller. How did the prologue fit into your plotting and commercial positioning?<\/strong><\/p>\n I love when people tell me they went into this book not expecting it to be horror. Like, they thought it was straight literary fiction, and then were surprised by how scary it is. I\u2019m worried about the opposite experience, disappointing readers of the horror genre who are disappointed by how not<\/em> scary it is. I had a bookseller refer to it as “dip your pinkie toe in horror,” which I appreciate.<\/p>\n Eleanor is struggling on a few different fronts here. That said, is homebuying the real horror at the heart of this book? Does that reflect your own lived experience in the Northwest?<\/strong><\/p>\n I live in a town house unit, and in 2022, there were windstorms that revealed how poorly constructed my home was. All this water started coming in through the doors and windows, and then simultaneously and seemingly unrelatedly, the second-floor piping began pouring into the floor and the ceiling below. And then our water heater had problems. It flooded in three different ways.\u00a0As far as the buying process goes for Eleanor, it\u2019s sort of hyperbolic, but only slightly. Houses are bought and sold in 20 minutes around here, and you’re fighting with companies or people buying in cash. It\u2019s the source of a lot of turmoil.<\/p>\n Eleanor is not the world\u2019s greatest therapist, especially considering the chaos in her own life. What\u2019s your experience with the practitioner\u2019s side of therapy? And how did you position Eleanor\u2019s clients to contribute to the larger plot and themes of this book?<\/strong><\/p>\n I did my undergrad in psychology, so becoming a clinician was always kind of the road not taken. I have experience in those classes, labs and research. I’ve also been in therapy. For the purpose of this book, I did research on YouTube and talked with providers about their experiences with online platforms. That was eye-opening. Eleanor is a pretty bad therapist. But I also feel like she’s the victim of a lot of systems and circumstances, and she didn’t have to be this way. Some of it is the nature of online therapy platforms.<\/p>\n As for the clients, they\u2019re victims of the same systems as Eleanor, but it manifests in really different ways. They\u2019re also incredibly lonely and isolated people, even though they have spouses and jobs. What comes out in therapy is that they\u2019re struggling for the same reasons as Eleanor. It\u2019s the same lack of community that results in their behaviors.<\/p>\n Eleanor has a dependent and, at times, combative relationship with domestic contractors in this book. Is that a reflection on her personality? On the nature of contracting? On your own experience?<\/strong><\/p>\n I think the world is set up these days so that our best interests do not often align with other people’s. And that’s very difficult. You don’t want<\/em> to distrust people. You want to assume the best in people. You want to assume that everyone is behaving and acting in good faith. It’s very unpleasant to go through life suspicious of everybody or thinking that people are trying to scam you. But in a lot of situations, you have no choice.<\/p>\n I don’t think Kurt (the contractor who works on Eleanor\u2019s house) is a bad guy. He\u2019s out for his own best interests. He’s a shrewd businessman, and you can’t fault him. I do think he’s a little surprised at Eleanor\u2019s naivet\u00e9. He wants the best for her, but he’s just a person that’s looking out for himself. As for the locksmith (who helps when Eleanor\u2019s door gets stuck), that interaction highlights how frightening locksmiths are, particularly to women living alone. It reveals the fiction of vulnerability, how secure you actually are. Eleanor is geographically and emotionally isolated in her house. It’s like, no one could hear you scream.<\/p>\n Part of this book resembles the kind of story that you might call a \u201cdescent into madness.\u201d What are some other films or novels you enjoy of this sort?<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cEarthlings\u201d by Sayaka Murata, \u201cBitter Orange\u201d by Claire Fuller and \u201cHelpmeet\u201d by Naben Ruthnum. In all of them, you end up in a horror novel and did not begin in one. And the escalation is slow until it isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yakimaherald.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cAt first glance,\u201d thinks Eleanor, the anxious millennial protagonist from Seattle author Kim Fu\u2019s new novel, \u201cThe Valley of Vengeful Ghosts\u201d (out March 3 from Tin House), \u201cshe thought it was a logging clear-cut, a vast trapezoid of razed land\u2026 The total surgical annihilation was stunning, an environmentalist\u2019s nightmare \u2014 the ground scraped clean of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2302093,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[21741],"class_list":["post-2302092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/In-Seattle-author-Kim-Fus-latest-novel-homebuying-is-horrific.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2302092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2302092"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2302092\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2302094,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2302092\/revisions\/2302094"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2302093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2302092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2302092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2302092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}