Kim Fu, The Valley of the Vengeful Spirits, translated from English by Annie Goulet, Héliotrope, September 4, 2026, 320 pages, €20
Lele, condemned by cancer, left to her daughter one final instruction: buy a property with the inheritance, and Eleanor Fan, a psychologist who consults via a screen, obeys. Above Bering Rock, a former mining town, a hurried agent signs in a few hours an offer for one of the two twin houses. They are the only completed ones in a development promised to around forty households; the other, carries the memory of the ruined developer… From the first night, the sky opens up for weeks and Lele reappears in the orange floral pajamas of her deathbed. Water seeps in through the windows and then through a leaking shower into the chandelier globe, bringing in craftsmen and experts to draw up ruinous quotes. Kim Fu, a Giller Prize finalist with Dark Creatures of the 21st Century, erects on this drenched terrain a haunted house whose cracks open onto contemporary America.
The Mother and the Puppeteer’s Voice
The ghost of Lele speaks with Eleanor’s voice. This rule is the power of the narrative. The ghost wears a sly grin Lele did not know in life, and Eleanor knows that she herself holds the strings of this puppet, a mother remade from memories that gradually crumble. In life, Lele washed Eleanor’s laundry, managed their joint accounts, slipped pieces of apple into her adult mouth while she rewrote her memoir, and one evening she even trimmed Eleanor’s toenails. From this sovereign tenderness arose a woman who, in the wake of bereavement, becomes the little girl abandoned in a parking lot.
When Teddy, her former mentor, conjures regression, her pupil tells him off, and the novelist nudges us to side with both with a precision that lends weight to what pain refuses to hear. As a child, Eleanor watched from a television program the closing song that promised “Now you know how the world works,” and as an adult she still waits for the instruction manual her mother took with her. Beneath these scenes lies an obvious guilt whose origin Kim Fu reveals in fragments.
The Showhouse and the Deluge
The showhouse, bought as-is, dazzles with its black ceramic bathroom where tiny lamps twinkle like stars. Eleanor quickly realizes she is living in a cinema set crafted to entice investors. The weatherproofing membrane proves defective, and the insurer notes that the homeowner’s policy covers natural disasters but excludes installation defects, shifting the claim to the builder, who is dead. We find ourselves in this well-known chain of responsibility, where guarantees evaporate along with the subcontractors.
The developer who killed himself takes in Eleanor’s imagination the features of a Far West pioneer, and at night she dreams of this man, where companies nest behind a mailing address and where she rules as a demiurge on the third day of Creation. From felled trees to the bodies of women, from the locksmith who locks her hand in, to the laboratory director whose assault drove her back to her mother, the book follows the same logic of appropriation that makes the valley a virgin land offered to a single conqueror. In 1919, Freud nestled the uncanny in the German adjective that speaks of the “home,” and Kim Fu is right to give him an architectural version, where the home turns against its owner through the course of expert assessments.
The Platform and the Virtual Ghosts
Eleanor has swapped her office for a Silicon Valley app that responds to anonymous clients. She is paid per session and lets the algorithm enforce penalties for the slightest missed appointment. Kim Fu shows us how—today—listening has become a commodity like any other, where low resolution distorts faces and most clients fade away after the first consultation. It is terrifying to see how the distresses that flash by sketch a society atomized, with a compulsive buyer who goes into debt to prepare a year of abstinence, a husband whom disaster-news makes indifferent to the color of his cushions, a mother summoned by the Court to consult in order to keep her visitation rights, and a seventy-year-old woman whose auto-generated subtitles drift into an absurd poem before delivering a plea from elsewhere.
Care then becomes automated in the therapist’s practice, and she finds herself speaking like ELIZA, that 1960s program that imitated listening by turning the patient’s phrases into questions. One day, her clients appear lined up against a wall beside Lele and the suicide-born builder, like travelers on a platform, and the screen already places them among the ghosts. When a stranger hangs up after recounting childhood violence, the app, alerted, replies with a thumbs-up that the user declares herself safe. It is through this pictogram that we discover the true diagnosis of solicitude gone awry, entrusted to machines.
The plot tightens as the rain intensifies. We learn how the house eventually closes in on Eleanor, as guilt and the last nights spent at Lele’s bedside resurface in flashes. Kim Fu guides this crescendo by successive glides, the chapters one by one gaining ground on reason, and that is why the psychological novel becomes a horror tale. Behind the haunting stands the question at the core of the book: a woman raised to obey who must now learn—at the heart of the deluge—to finally decide her own salvation, deprived of a mother who once thought for her. The final pages, with unrelenting tension, provide the answer that the reader will obviously discover for themselves.
The translation by Annie Goulet lends this suspenseful prose a French capable of sliding from craft to nightmare with the same breath. The Valley of the Vengeful Spirits is a major novel of hauntings, where every drop of rain becomes a piece of evidence against our time.
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