Former actor turned award-winning writer Kevin Chen's Ghost Town is certainly cinematic, populated with unforgettable characters--living, dead and in between.
Welcome to Yongjing, "a rural backwater in central Taiwan," just as Ghost Month looms. The Chen clan is about to experience an unexpected reunion, drawn together by the prodigal appearance of the clan's youngest, Keith. Years earlier, a six-month writing residency in Berlin enabled Keith's escape from their abusive mother and homophobic community. He found love with T, which led to a registered partnership. Then suddenly T was dead, and Keith was imprisoned for murder. When Keith is released 10 years later, he returns to Yongjing, and what's left of his family.
Cliff and Cicada Chen had five daughters--Beverly, Betty, Belinda, Barbie and Plenty--trying to birth a son, then came Heath and finally Keith. All of them have grown to have complex lives, and into that maelstrom, with nowhere else to go, Keith arrives, with so many family secrets left to be bared and shared.
If the family's name is not a hint of autobiographical inspiration, Chen's (Three Ways to Get Rid of Allergies) afterword affirms plenty of additional overlaps: his Yongjing youth, his many sisters, his gay identity, his town's homophobia, his current Berlin home. Professor Darryl Sterk translates, his unconventional choices adroitly explained in his ending note. Chen divulges key events in multi-voiced, circular repetition, each time adding a little more information, as if to increase the circumference and take up more space. With each iterative reveal, Chen gloriously resurrects the dead--and emboldens the living. --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon