I may be a little out of season with my recent haunted reads, but I know there are spooky people just like me pushing a creepy agenda year-round. This time, I picked up Linghun by Ai Jiang, a deeply upsetting story about death and grief. For me, this story evolved beyond an entertaining horror story and became a therapeutic exploration of my own journey with grief.
In a town called HOME, the living keeps the dead alive. Grief-stricken and desperate people throw their life away for an opportunity to own a house here. These homes are special because it’s where ghosts can appear, giving people a chance to live with their dead loved ones once again. Wenqi and her family are the newest inhabitants in HOME, but she hates the isolated town, her mother’s detachment, and the lingerers that peer through the windows. Grief has a hold on HOME, but Wenqi will attempt to stay out of its clutches.
I can’t go into much detail about Linghun without giving the plot away, but I can share a lot of the themes and emotions explored in the book. The story doesn’t use ghosts to scare the reader in the traditional sense—nothing will pop out at you or flash scary images. But the presence of ghosts in Linghun does create a different type of horror, one that showcases how grief creeps in and can rot everything it touches through the eyes of two high schoolers Wenqi and Liam, and an elderly neighbor, Mrs.
The three POVs showcase the ways grief manifests, comforts, and ruins. Wenqi’s perspective shows us how grief can make a person, in this case her mother, lose sight of what’s important and disconnect from reality. The mother is so obsessed with the ghost of her son that she is no longer a parent to the child who is still living. From Liam’s POV, we encounter a boy who didn’t know the loved one who passed, and therefore he cannot share in the grief that his parents carry. He becomes a receptacle for their grief which ruins his life and makes him feel responsible for his parent’s happiness. Grief shows up in Mrs.’s life, too, where she grieves for her husband but also for the life she had and the person she became. She has a lot of resentment for what was and what could have been, and this complicated grief prevents her from creating a better life for herself.
Grief plays out in so many different ways in this story, and there is so much that can be unpacked, but I want to focus on how Linghun shows how personal grief is. It’s both a shared emotion that everyone will experience one day, and it’s also something foreign and unknowable. It manifests differently, it sticks around for varied amounts of time, and it affects each person in a unique way. No one can understand what grief truly is until they experience it themselves. But even then their grief will never look like someone else’s grief. It’s such a complicated emotion that is both universal and isolating, and Jiang captures the nuance of it in her story with devastating detail.
If you can make space for grief to sit and stay for a while, pick up Linghun. There’s a great haunted house element to this story, but Ai Jang does not shy away from exploring the darker side of death and what remains of the living.
Rating: Linghun – 9.0/10
-Brandee
