After several years away, Chen returns to his hometown for Zhongyuan Festival, also known as Hungry Ghost Festival. This desolate village is filled with many memories of the married, dead, and mad family of Kevin Chen. Kevin Chen uses various perspectives and times to construct a story of family secrets, superstition, and a search for identity.

The Taiwan’s Literature Awarded book Ghost Town, translated by Darryl Sterk, is a crowded yet intimate examination of the impact of generational and individual trauma. Chen depicts rape, murder, suicide, cruelty, self- harm, and violence; vicious incidents that follow in succession. The shifts between characters and time can be dizzying. The structure is clearly intended to be episodic, so that the underlying meaning slowly builds chapter by chapter.

Trigger warning: suicide, rape, adultery, verbal abuse, drug use, torture, homophobia, Nazis, violence, exile, blood, death, eating of animals, and gambling. ( )

Ghost Town, by Kevin Chen and translated by Darryl Sterk, is a crowded yet intimate examination of both family and individual trauma.

Told in both flashback and the work's present, this novel uses the protagonist as the focal point to present multiple situations involving every member of his large family. Taking place during the town's Ghost Festival, we are presented with various concepts of ghost and, broadly speaking, haunting. Each family member is haunted by ghosts, of those no longer alive as well as of their younger selves. Events haunt them, so in some respect an event can be a ghost.

Unless you're of Taiwanese descent the customs may not be familiar to you, but the human interaction, the way we all affect and are affected by our families (by blood or by choice), will be familiar to every reader. It is that humanity that drives the story and compels the reader to care about these characters.

Sterk has a note at the end about how he chose names and certain other translation choices he made, I won't repeat that and pass it off as my own perceptions, but it makes for interesting reading. It also makes me think that, as good as the translation is, the original probably is quite wonderful. But that is true of even the best translations.

Highly recommended for readers who enjoy family drama and complex (but easy to follow) plots.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. ( )