by Corrine Watson
March 3, 2026
Valley of Vengeful Ghosts by Kim Fu; Tin House Press; 240 pages; $17.99.
With a reputation for pushing the boundaries of the literary form, Kim Fu continues to write with sharp genre-bending prose in her latest novel, Valley of Vengeful Ghosts. Published on the heels of the brilliant short story collection, Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, Fu’s latest novel follows Eleanor as she attempts to navigate life after her mother’s death and fulfill her final wishes to invest her inheritance in home ownership. Yet, it feels diminutive to say the novel is about grief. Instead, Fu explores the psychological toll of a relationship grounded in codependence, and the everyday threat of patriarchy.
Eleanor isn't particularly likable, as far as protagonists typically go. She's self-pitying, passive and has an innate helplessness for someone well into adulthood. The root of this is her dependence on her mother, Lele, whose death has left Eleanor unmoored by grief, shame, and uncertainty as she attempts to manage without the safety net of her mother. Eleanor admits, “I just wish she was still here, to tell me what to do… I feel like a child, in the worst possible way. Like I'm five years old and she abandoned me in a parking lot.” On the surface, these feelings are perfectly rational for someone who’s lost a parent, but Fu uses this to illustrate just how ill-equipped Eleanor is to exist in a world without her mother’s care. This forces the reader to confront how this relationship, while rooted in care, has ultimately left Eleanor more vulnerable.
Lele managed every aspect of Eleanor’s care from work, finances, meals, laundry and at times personal hygiene. Fu suggests that there was an opportunity for Eleanor to become independent in college, but after being sexually assaulted by a professor, who was not held accountable. As Eleanor’s mental health deteriorates, she returns to live with her mother. The ripple effects of her assault are evident in how she navigates interactions with men and where she seeks safety, allowing Fu to show how trauma persists beyond the moment of violence. This moment is the catalyst that solidifies the relationship of toxic dependence that will follow them until Lele becomes too sick to continue. In one scene, Fu describes Lele hand feeding Eleanor pieces of fruit, and then clipping her toe nails. For a brief moment, Eleanor is disturbed by the act, but rather than creating a boundary, she embraces the care: “She felt a soothing, mindless distance from her own feet, from her whole body. She wished to abdicate her ownership of it, her responsibility for it, give it over to Lele’s care.”
Following the unprocessed trauma of sexual violence, the desire to dissociate from her body resonates as a natural response and the gentleness of maternal nurture lulls her into complicit surrender rather than emotional healing. Fu uses these memories to contextualize Eleanor’s stagnation and illustrate how Eleanor hasn’t consciously chosen to live. Lele’s nurturing instincts read as practical rather than emotional, which is interesting to see from Eleanor’s perspective. At first, Lele reads as a classic overbearing mother, but as Fu reveals more, it becomes clear that she is bearing an immense burden to protect her daughter from the demands of the world in a way that is ultimately damaging to both of them.
Fu uses Eleanor’s vulnerability to create a sense of tension in the book as she moves into an isolated, unfinished neighborhood during a catastrophic rainstorm. As the persistent rain exposes the poor construction of her home, Eleanor is forced to juggle one crisis after another while managing the basic demands of adult life on her own for the first time. Throughout the novel, Eleanor is desperately waiting for a real adult to show up and save her, eventually conjuring the ghost of Lele less out of grief and more out of a desire to find guidance. But when she realizes that her manifestation cannot provide the answers she desires, she becomes overwhelmed by despair because “she’d made this ghost. It couldn’t tell her anything new.”
The memory of her assault lingers as a barely healed wound in every interaction with her new world. Men come and go now to work on her home, and her fear is reinforced when her locksmith demands an egregious surcharge, and Eleanor understands the unspoken threat. “He didn’t have to say why. That he knew where she lived, alone in this wasteland, and now they both understood locks to be a fiction.” Fu aptly captures the quiet calculations women are forced to navigate to protect themselves. Although Eleanor is seeking a parental substitute, advisor, or protector, she only finds exploitation and disappointment. Her predatory realtor manufactures urgency to pressure her into signing the paperwork without an inspection only to disappear when issues arise. While her contractor is genuinely trying to help, it is still just a business relationship, he’s not her dad or her friend. Even her mentor who she always respected professionally and saw as a father figure turns out to be a self-absorbed creep. Each encounter adds to Eleanor’s disappointment and sense of isolation while capturing the nuanced dangers women face in a power imbalance with men.
In Valley of Vengeful Ghosts, Eleanor is haunted less by literal spirits than by the lingering effects of trauma and the very real threat women navigate in a world that wasn’t built to protect them. Through Eleanor and Lele’s relationship, Fu illustrates how unhealed trauma creates nuanced ramifications as Eleanor finds safety in isolation and unquestioned control as she becomes fully reliant on her mother’s care and guidance. When this protective bubble collapses and Eleanor must face the world on her own, Fu lets the novel resonate with a potential for resilience that isn’t immediate or empowering but messy and uncertain, a feeling resonant with the lived experience of trauma survivors.
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Living in the Aftermath: Codependency and Unhealed Trauma in Kim Fu's Valley of Vengeful Ghosts
FICTION REVIEW
Image by Vitaly Gariev from Unsplash
Corrine Watson is a freelance writer and editor based in Charlotte, NC. Her work has appeared in Wretched Creations and the Southern Review of Books. Follow her on X @CorrineWatson6.
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© 2025 Iron Oak Editions
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© 2026 Iron Oak Editions
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