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the brides of high hill
Nghi Vo, The Brides of High Hill.
The cleric Chih is accompanying a beautiful merchant's daughter to the rich compound on the top of a hill where her betrothed awaits. This man has had other wives, but they have all left or disappeared; if it weren't for the strange pronouncements of his possibly-mad eldest son, one could assume they had never existed. Chih is uneasy about everything, especially the fate of her charming new friend.
Vo's Singing Hills novellas always play with genre. Brides of High Hill is obviously invoking the gothic novel, nurse with too much laudanum and all. But there's another genre of creepy stories at play. One hint that something weird is going on is that Chih, who usually collects everyone's stories, can't get any of the servants to talk to them--they don't even seem to know any of the hangers-on in the merchants' retinue. It's easy to overlook these worries, when the mundane implications of the looming marriage are so terrifying; it would be fascinating to re-read this novella, assuming it never was a gothic novel.
(I read this book as a Netgalley ARC; in the US, it's out now.)
The cleric Chih is accompanying a beautiful merchant's daughter to the rich compound on the top of a hill where her betrothed awaits. This man has had other wives, but they have all left or disappeared; if it weren't for the strange pronouncements of his possibly-mad eldest son, one could assume they had never existed. Chih is uneasy about everything, especially the fate of her charming new friend.
Vo's Singing Hills novellas always play with genre. Brides of High Hill is obviously invoking the gothic novel, nurse with too much laudanum and all. But there's another genre of creepy stories at play. One hint that something weird is going on is that Chih, who usually collects everyone's stories, can't get any of the servants to talk to them--they don't even seem to know any of the hangers-on in the merchants' retinue. It's easy to overlook these worries, when the mundane implications of the looming marriage are so terrifying; it would be fascinating to re-read this novella, assuming it never was a gothic novel.
(I read this book as a Netgalley ARC; in the US, it's out now.)