When it came time for Kim Fu to commence work on their fifth book, they wanted to return to the way they’d traditionally written their novels. Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, their Giller-shortlisted and 2023 Danuta Gleed Literary Award–winning short story collection, garnered the Vancouver-born Canadian writer plaudits in Time, The Globe and Mail, The New York Times Book Review, and on NPR and CBC – but this attention was not necessarily conducive to artistic creation.  

“I’ve been writing stories since I was little,” Fu tells me from their Seattle home. “When I was a child and teen, writing was free-flowing. But the idea of getting a book to market, of factoring the input of editors and agents, then people reacting online – I do feel these things have been holding me back in a certain way.”

Fu attributes their re-energized approach to writing to Tin House editor Masie Cochran, who guided the completion of The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts (out now from HarperCollins Canada), Fu’s supernatural imagining of a clinician’s grief and upended therapeutic practice caused by the flooding of her home.

“Masie makes me feel like we’re doing an art project just for the two of us,” Fu beams. “I’m able to forget about the publishing machine. I feel freer, like I’m writing with a new kind of ease.” 

“This is the second time I’m working with Masie,” Fu continues, “and I decided to chase this other vision for my writing. Usually I do research and plan everything brick by brick, but Valley was an outpouring of a pure nightmarish feeling.”

Fu channelled memories of their father’s death, their mother’s cancer diagnosis in 2020, and the flooding of their Seattle townhome due to windstorms into The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts. The protagonist’s late mother Lele has bequeathed her with a large endowment, but even with financial assistance, Eleanor can only afford a model home where an insolvent real estate developer died by suicide. As Eleanor continues her post-pandemic clinical practice virtually, she becomes haunted by the lives of her clients and the roving spirit of Lele. 

“Eleanor is a bit suffocating,” Fu says. “She makes bad choices, finds herself in relentlessly difficult situations. It’s like an Edith Wharton novel where the characters orchestrate their own financial ruin and you’re watching them just spin out.”

To alleviate the tension in these nail-biting scenarios – Eleanor is recovering from a mentor/mentee relationship that crossed professional lines, she does not possess home insurance at the time of the flooding, and begins taking her clinical appointments in her car due to non-stop home renovations – Fu says it was important to have Eleanor’s clients break up the “emotional texture of the book,” even if they “suffer under the same forces and systems that Eleanor does.”

Eleanor’s clients include shopaholics, embittered misogynists, and neurotic eschatologists; her engagement with their ill-adjusted behaviours soon overrides her already delicate mental composure. Transference, a psychoanalytical concept describing the displacement of a patient’s feelings and emotions about an important person in their lives onto another individual (typically their therapist), is a driving force in destabilizing Eleanor. 

Normally, clinicians can identify and redirect transference in productive ways (or identify it occurring in themselves for that matter), but Eleanor is so overwhelmed by her deteriorating home and the rekindling of a relationship with a former beau that her clinical practice begins to suffer.   

“Transference is a phenomenon that is interesting to me because we are simultaneously lacking for community and able to pay people to do things for us,” Fu says. “You’re expected to do everything alone, but before, you had a village to help you go through major life experiences: elder care, end-of-life care, childbirth. Now there are a million gig economy services you’re supposed to depend on instead of asking your friends. Driving to the airport is a very different proposition now with Uber than it would have been 20 years ago. 

“Transference came to mind because under our current economic arrangement, I realized that a therapist can play the wrong role in people’s lives. We all can play the wrong role. The emotional component for all these life experiences – of being in service to each other and being present for each other – changes when it becomes a feature of a capitalist exercise.”

Eleanor’s engagement with her clients becomes almost a completely money-focused affair as she incurs a slew of renovation bills on account of nearby mudslides.

“Eleanor considered taking her first appointment from bed, but couldn’t bring herself to sink that low,” Fu writes. “She needed her clients. She dragged the dining chairs from the spare bedroom into hers, resealed the door with towels. The white walls of her bedroom now gleamed faintly with moisture, like a sheen of sweat.”  

Fu’s grimly textured writing on grief takes on a fantastical quality at moments; The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts’ invocation of sweating walls, hauntings, and delirium-fuelled imaginings is not a product of chance. 

“Grief is an emotion that pushed me to let go of realism,” Fu says. “It’s an experience and an emotion that doesn’t seem best contained by the bounds of reality. If you describe the physical realities of grieving in writing, it’s not enough. If you reach for ghosts and monsters or impossible, larger-than-life beings, I find that you get closer to the emotional truth of it.” 

Writing about grief affords an opportunity to create beyond the guardrails of genre or staid poetic structures; what is of importance is to honour a sense of authentic suffering. “Grief is so directionless and huge that it becomes not about a specific loss, but all losses ever,” Fu says. 

“There’s a metaphysical nature to it too,” Fu adds, “where reality becomes thin and porous – while you’ve lost someone from a physical reality, they still feel very present to you. … You hear their voice and feel like they’re imbued in objects around you. Even if you’re a staunch materialist, you feel things that seem beyond the world of the senses.” 

Photo of Kim Fu by JP Lobo.