Award-winning children's and young adult author Christina Li (True Love and Other Impossible Odds) spellbinds and unsettles with her adult literary debut about intergenerational grief, The Manor of Dreams. An atmospheric reboot of the haunted house trope set in both the present day and in '70s and '80s Hollywood, Li's novel is as richly textured as it is chilling.

When Nora Deng is summoned with her mother to attend the reading of Vivian Yin's will, she's baffled. She knows almost nothing about Vivian, a now largely forgotten movie star who once made headlines as the first Chinese actress to win an Oscar. Nora's mother, Elaine, the daughter of Vivian's long-ago housekeeper, gives Nora two warnings: don't speak to the Yin family without a lawyer present and never go into the Yin estate's sprawling gardens.

But when Nora arrives at Vivian Yin's Southern California mansion, she finds more than her mother ever could have warned her about. Vivian, who died suddenly and mysteriously, had made a last-minute change in her will to leave the crumbling house and its grounds to Elaine instead of Vivian's daughters. While eldest daughter Lucille insists on staying on the property until she can get the will contested, Lucille's daughter Madeline is just as mystified by the family's clearly fraught history as Nora is. Meanwhile, visions of a woman with dirt spilling from her mouth and roses with a taste for blood begin haunting Vivian's younger daughter, Rennie, and Madeline's waking hours. Soon, it becomes clear even to the most rational-minded Yin that inheriting the estate might be more of a trap than an opportunity. And that the devastating events that happened 30 years ago won't stay buried forever.

Told in alternating perspectives among members of the Deng and Yin families, as well as across decades with flashbacks to Vivian's time as an ingénue, The Manor of Dreams is a bejeweled puzzle box to unlock. Each perspective provides another fragment in the novel's overall portrait of a family ripped apart by the dark secrets underlying the supposed American Dream. But just as Li details the horrors of this dream, her writing illustrates its appeal, too. She limns the novel with lush details, like the Yin estate, with "sun-paled mahogany, glowing reddish in the afternoon light" and "sweet, velvety Guerlain perfume." Such depictions are so compelling that the cause of the novel's ambient dread seems to lie outside the dream. Yet when that simmering horror does finally bubble to the surface, it's the warped reflection of this world's own glamor that the reader is forced to face.

In such moments, Li never shies away from crafting shiver-inducing imagery to haunt even the most seasoned horror reader's nightmares. Much of this imagery delights in the embodiment of rot and overgrowth: Lucille feels "swollen, bloated lips" taking shape on her own face, while Madeline and Nora feel their "blood dripp[ing] onto the vines" that constrain their arms so tightly they become like a secondary set of tendons. The boundaries between these characters and the estate blur past recognition, as what is beautiful and what is grotesque become inseparable. And while casting a haunted house as the externalized encapsulation of internal traumas is perhaps not new in the neo-gothic genre, Li's commitment to linking the appeal of the haunted family estate so closely to the seductive elements of what destroys it is distinctly compelling.

Most importantly, Li never loses sight of the emotional core of this story, even when its setting and imagery sometimes take center stage. Whether digging into the armor of thick skin and suspicion Lucille has cultivated around herself or Nora's tireless desire to succeed and to defend those she loves, Li insightfully cuts into the refracted ways the dual Yin and Deng family history has impacted its offspring. Most biting, perhaps, is Li's depiction of Vivian, the complex matriarch at the novel's heart. Ambitious but also compassionate, young Vivian is thrilled to help her handsome, wealthy new husband rebuild his family's estate, despite its fraught history. But as Vivian works to create a desirable life, amidst a frustrated career and troubled marriage, she comes to see the house as a sarcophagus she's built for herself.

In pivotal moments of decision-making, Vivian carries with her both the overbearing promise of the life she thinks she wants and the suffocating stories she was told as a child: "She remembered how long ago she had heard stories... about how Ming dynasty concubines were buried with their emperor when he died.... She was not going to let her husband ruin her or her children. Vivian Yin had fought tooth and nail to survive in this country. To make sure her children survived. She would not die a good wife." In moments like this, Vivian's fierceness is undeniable, as is the constant atmosphere of claustrophobia in which she lives. Her decisions may be, at times, devastating both to herself and those around her. But what else, Li leads us to wonder, is one supposed to do to avoid being buried alive? By the novel's end, it's not the twisted paths these characters chose to entrap themselves that readers will remember, but the strength of the muscles--literal and figurative--that they employ to rip themselves free of what binds them. --Alice Martin

Christina Li (photo: Therese Santiago)

Christina Li is the award-winning author of such children's and young adult books as Ruby Lost and Found and True Love and Other Impossible Odds. In The Manor of Dreams, Li's chilling adult debut, five women face down each other and the haunted estate they are set to inherit after the death of Vivian Yin, once known for being the first Chinese woman to win an Oscar. The Manor of Dreams will be published by Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster on March 11, 2025.

What was it about the classic haunted house trope that interested you in the context of this story?

I love a good haunted house story--the hidden tragic backstories, the spookiness of the house itself, the confined nature of it all. There is something compelling about the home, a traditional source of comfort and protection, being inverted into something sinister and destructive. I included the inheritance element as well to bring a new twist to it: What if people are fighting to inherit a house they don't know is haunted? That ultimately formed the first kernels of inspiration for Manor.

How did you thread these different characters and generations together?

The book is narrated by three generations of women--each character has been affected by their family history in a different way. I wanted to write the story over these generations to show exactly how each person inherits and passes on the trauma and expectations they've experienced, and how silence is reinforced over and over again. Each person, too, holds particular clues around what they know about Vivian Yin, the recently deceased matriarch--and about what happened in the house over 30 years ago. How do they all individually react and grieve Vivian's death when they reunite for the will? What secrets are they hiding from each other? What must I reveal in the past timeline to shed light on what's happening in the present?

As for a voice that I became surprisingly fond of, I really adored Lucille, one of Vivian's daughters, a lawyer who is firmly determined to fight to inherit the house and uncover the potentially suspicious circumstances around her mother's death. She's principled but doesn't always make the best--or kindest--decisions. I love writing complicated, deeply flawed, and ambitious women. She was one of my favorites.

What made Nora the character you wanted to start the novel with?

Starting the novel with Nora was an intentional choice--she is a character that almost seems "external" to the history of the house at first. She doesn't know anything about the house, or why she's even been summoned for the reading of the will, or what Vivian Yin has to do with her. Her receiving those two vague, ominous warnings from her mother--don't talk to Vivian Yin's family, and don't go into the garden--is her first introduction to the Yin family and to the home. I wanted her to almost be a proxy character for the reader at the beginning, so it feels like she is experiencing the story as we are.

Were there any particular images of the house's hauntings that came to you early on?

Yes! Not to spoil the book too much, but there is some creepy imagery with the roses in the garden that was actually one of the first things I imagined for this book. I loved the idea of a haunted garden. This novel conceptualizes hauntings as an extension of grief, and so I took care in making sure that each person is also haunted by something deeply personal to them--and that compounds with the horrors of the house to make for an even more foreboding experience.

What inspired you to want to write about a certain "golden" era of Hollywood?

The '70s and '80s are said to have been a very exciting and very inventive time to be in Hollywood, but I think the ultimate question is--for whom? Who was given the chances and resources to succeed? One of my research books was Hollywood Chinese by Arthur Dong, which discusses the trajectories of Chinese stars in Hollywood, and the general story there is it was difficult to break into Hollywood, and the roles that Chinese American actors got were often relegated to minor roles that played into the same stereotypes over and over again. And if they got one opportunity to succeed, it would still not be easy to get another. I wanted Vivian to experience the glamor and decadence and the novel energy of the '70s and '80s Hollywood renaissance, but also endure the very real marginalizations and limitations of the American movie business at the time.

What would you consider some of your tuning fork texts while you were writing this book?

There was a lot of media that really influenced me when I was writing this book, and "tuning fork text" is such a great way to describe it! I was particularly inspired by the Mike Flanagan Haunting series--The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor. I was also inspired by Silvia Moreno Garcia's Mexican Gothic; it is so beautifully written and taut and tense and examines the horror as grounded in the contexts of history and colonialism. For music, Phoebe Bridgers's "I Know the End" and Conan Gray's "Family Line" were on repeat when I was drafting the book. In terms of other inspirations or conversations, too, I feel like I was loosely in conversation with two other texts: The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin, which is a famous Chinese classic detailing the rise and fall of a prestigious family amid a doomed love affair; and The Great Gatsby, which perfectly enmeshes the promise with the shortcomings of the American Dream, a thematic touchstone of my novel.

What was the biggest challenge of writing The Manor of Dreams?

Writing a book across three generations, told in dual timelines, with several POV characters definitely made for a very intricate process! Part of this book is also a murder mystery of sorts, and so it was important to ensure that I gave the characters distinct voices, stories, conjectures, and that all the details would line up at the end. I had a couple of spreadsheets going on. But I have always wanted to write a sprawling, multigenerational book, and so this was a challenge that I took on giddily. This book bent my mind. I loved it.

How did the process of writing The Manor of Dreams differ from working on your previous books?

I have a unique process for each book I've written, and I love how each book's journey differs depending on the demands of the story. I knew from the moment I ideated The Manor of Dreams that it would be an adult literary. I've previously written middle grade and young adult contemporary/historical, and so I think the shift in genre as well as age category--as well as the logistical requirements of the story itself with the dual timeline format and close third POV structure (something which I've never done before as I've always written in first-person POV)--made for a very singular writing experience. --Alice Martin