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Electric Literature is pleased to uncover the screen of The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts by Kim Fu, which volition beryllium published connected March 3, 2026 by Tin House successful the US and HarperCollins successful Canada. You tin pre-order your transcript here.
From the critically acclaimed and award-winning author of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century comes The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts—an eerie, spellbinding caller of grief and guilt, with a razor-sharp oculus for the absurdity and melancholy of the net age.
In the aftermath of her mother’s death, Eleanor is unmoored. For years, her parent orchestrated each item of her life—from meals, to laundry, to finances—so that Eleanor could absorption connected her vocation arsenic a therapist. Left to navigate the satellite connected her own, Eleanor clings to her mother’s last directive: usage her inheritance to bargain a house.
Desperate to obey her parent 1 past time, but uncovering fewer options she tin afford, Eleanor impulsively buys a exemplary location successful a valley-turned-construction site, a picturesque improvement steeped successful a shadowy history. It feels similar a caller start, until the rainfall comes—an endless, torrential downpour. As h2o seeps successful done the house’s cracks, the enactment betwixt what is existent and what is not begins to blur. Haunted by the stories of her patients, a watercourse of workmen and bureaucrats she can’t trust, and visions of ghosts from her past and present, Eleanor’s world unravels, and she is forced to reckon with the secrets she’s buried and the hopeless choices she’s made.
Here’s the cover, designed by Beth Steidle:
Kim Fu: While penning and editing, I often effort to deliberation astir however a first-time scholar would acquisition the words that are really connected the page, alternatively than however good I person realized immoderate preexisting imaginativeness oregon intention. When I archetypal received this cover, aft a gut affirmative reaction, I tried to measure it the aforesaid way. As opposed to “is this the screen I expected?” I tried to think, “if I were a scholar walking done a bookstore, and I came crossed this publication knowing thing of its contents, however would I react?”
There’s thing instantly charismatic astir this cover; the aggravated colors and large typeface would telephone to maine from a shelf, beckoning, hard to ignore. The rubric sounds similar horror, but the plan suggests unease, an off-kilter, ironic edge, alternatively than gore oregon grit. The airy peach of the substance is astatine archetypal a pretty, gentle hue, evocative of sunset, but arsenic the semantic meaning sinks in—vengeful—the letters alternatively statesman to look burnt oregon marked oregon injured by the reds and pinks. The repeating, translucent houses are ghostly but besides impish, resting upon the lettering, peeking retired from wrong the O, the lit windows successful the rainfall beaming retired from the screen similar eyes. The graphic, unreal prime of the agleam bluish rainfall and agleam green, perfectly adjacent rolling hills, the archetypical location shape—a child’s conception of rain, hills, houses—suggest that the publication has a fable-like quality: the location is not a circumstantial house, but the thought of a house; the rainfall isn’t the wide h2o that falls from the sky, but a mythic force, rainfall arsenic it appears successful dreams, fantasies, parables. Despite each the bold color, achromatic dominates the background, shadows overtaking the hills and seeping done the text. The screen is subtly successful speech with the screen of my past book, Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century—they would look beauteous broadside by side—while besides wholly caller and distinct.
It’s perfect, I thought.
Early on, I’d talked with my exertion astatine Tin House, Masie Cochran, astir a mates circumstantial images from the publication arsenic imaginable covers: a chandelier dripping with water, an impossibly ample cervid subordinate lasting successful a kitchen. The caller was besides inspired, successful part, by a recurring nightmare I had astir a location made of sweetener dissolving successful the rain. In summation to being spoilers (and a small excessively on-the-nose), what these images person successful communal is simply a consciousness of corroding beauty, disillusion, a slow-burning realization that things aren’t rather right. We agreed that a “dark” screen was the evident choice, but what if, Masie suggested, it was astir painfully agleam instead? I liked these ideas, but I had nary thought however they would travel together.
Beth nailed it. Already this screen is inextricably tangled with my conception of the story, with Eleanor’s fears and inventions and the unfolding of her life. I tin consciousness Beth’s shade houses watching maine successful the dark.
Beth Steidle: I was truthful struck by Kim’s caller and the mode that profound loss—loss of parent, partner, job, and home—is explored done an astir mythic landscape: the skeleton of a lodging development, an abandoned valley, shifting mountains, each plagued by a relentless, torrential downpour. Because the communicative is profoundly idiosyncratic and inhabited by morally complex, often frustrating characters, I archetypal thought that the screen should diagnostic 1 oregon much distorted figures. But ultimately, it felt much fitting to represent the setting, arsenic this spot embodies the magnitude of the book’s events and the interior turmoil of the protagonist. The wavy greenish signifier is meant to invoke hills but besides to consciousness undulating, similar the flood that is coming from the strangely agleam rainfall conscionable opening to determination down. The houses are ghostly and astir fleeting, portion the singular location with its lights connected hints astatine a lonely quality presence, idiosyncratic trying to past successful a acheronian and surreal place.
The station Exclusive Cover Reveal of “The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts” by Kim Fu appeared archetypal connected Electric Literature.
