Ghosts of colonialism haunt atmospheric YA horror

Summer always puts me in the mood for a good horror story, even more so now that Summerween has become a thing, and the kinds of horror stories I tend to gravitate toward are the atmospheric haunting types. I can't resist a ghost story, which is why I really enjoyed Trang Thanh Tran's YA horror novel, "She Is a Haunting" by Trang Thanh Tran. Set in modern day Vietnam, "She Is a Haunting" is a spine-chilling ghost story about a broken family haunted both literally and figuratively by the ghosts of the past in a house threatening to eat them up. The story primarily centers the narrative of recent high school graduate, Jade Nguyen, who travels to her parents' home country of Vietnam alongside her younger sister to spend the summer with their estranged father, Ba, at a decrepit villa he's renovating. Jade's relationship with Ba is a contentious one, soured by both Ba's abandonment of their family years earlier and by the emotional harms he caused her before he left, but she is motivated to spend the summer with him for one sole reason: Ba has promised to pay her college tuition in exchange for her staying the summer. Despite the reward that awaits her at the end of the summer, navigating the complexities of their estranged relationship is made all the more difficult by the increasing unease Jade feels in the house once occupied by French colonizers. Tran's creepy use of insect carcasses littering the windowsills of the villa is one of the early details that helps build the house's frightening atmosphere early on, and the terror only grows from there as Jade begins to have frightening and unexplainable encounters. When the story shifts from Jade's narrative, readers are given eerie interludes written from the perspective of the house itself, each grotesquely named after parts of the body, like Kidney, Larynx, and Marrow. One of these interludes, Mouth, even serves as the novel's opening, and through this Tran presents readers with the story's unsettling opening line, "The house eats and is eaten." Between the house's ravenous hunger and Jade's search for the history behind the haunting, the novel uses elements of horror to explore the ways the shadow of colonialism continues to haunt the living descendants of the places and people once impacted by it, as well as the haunting impacts of generational trauma on families. The decrepit villa is not only a house haunted, in the traditional sense, but it is also a place haunted by the atrocities of its traumatic history. The novel is a must-read for teens who enjoy a more nuanced exploration of horror elements.