Alvin Lu - Cheng-Ming is an outsider trying to unmask both the fugitive criminal and the otherworld of spiritual forces that are inexorably taking control of the city. Things get complicated when the fetid island atmosphere begins to melt his contact lenses and his worsening sight paradoxically opens up the teeming world of ghosts and chimeras that surround him

 

Alvin Lu, The Hell Screens. Camphor Press,

2019

Cheng-Ming, a Taiwanese American, rummages through the used-book stalls and market bins of Taipei. His object is no ordinary one; he's searching obsessively for accounts of ghosts and spirits, suicides and murders in a city plagued by a rapist-killer and less tangible forces. Cheng-Ming is an outsider trying to unmask both the fugitive criminal and the otherworld of spiritual forces that are inexorably taking control of the city. Things get complicated when the fetid island atmosphere begins to melt his contact lenses and his worsening sight paradoxically opens up the teeming world of ghosts and chimeras that surround him. Vengeful and anonymous spirits commandeer Cheng-Ming's sight, so that he cannot distinguish past from present, himself from another. Images from modern and colonial Taiwan – an island of restless spirits – assail Cheng-Ming even as they captivate the reader.

“Written with precise elegance, and populated by ghosts, mediums, and criminals, Alvin Lu’s The Hell Screens is surrealist noir set in a shadow version of Taipei that exposes the spirits and superstitions of Taiwan’s complex past lurking beneath its modern cityscapes. Alvin Lu has a singular imagination accompanied by the gift of enviably gorgeous prose. “Haunting” is the right word for this work—encountering The Hell Screens again, I realize I have been carrying the voice and images of this astounding novel in my mind as ghostly dream fragments for the last two decades.”— Shawna Yang Ryan, author of Green Island

At one point in this uncanny novel, the narrator, Ch ng-ming, describes his literal absorption into a Buddhist temple mural: "Particles of dispersed light seeped into my pores so that I became indistinguishable from them. The more I looked, the more I found myself enclosed in the mural's world." Enclosure in an unreal world is the threat that hangs over all of modern-day Taipei, at least as Ch ng-ming lives it. Lu's debut novel is divided between two notebooks, the first recording 19 days during which Ch ng-ming, a Chinese-American, investigates a master criminal named K. who is on the loose in the city; the other, much shorter, is by K. himself. The quest for K. leads Ch ng-ming to interview Sylvia, a school girl who claims to have been K.'s lover. Sylvia, a fortune teller, says she and K. committed double suicide, except that the pills didn't kill her. Fatty, a ghost-obsessed filmmaker, is making a documentary about Wang, an exorcist who is supposedly driving the spirits from the apartment building in which Ch ng-ming lives. Ch ng-ming learns from Fatty that Sylvia is herself a vampiric ghost. After K. is discovered using a vacant apartment in Ch ng-ming's building, the narrative veers into a rapid dematerialization of reality. Fatty is murdered, and the police use Wang to make a sort of extrasensory investigation, implicating Sylvia. Although sometimes stylistically overburdened, the novel is a hypnotic venture into the uncertain reality of liminal existences. Sophisticated readers on the lookout for fresh literary talent will relish Lu's ambitious debut. —Publishers Weekly

“Will appeal to anyone who loves the cat-and-mouse games of Nabokov, the playful elegance of Borges or the rarefied dreamscapes of Calvino.” — The New York Times Book Review

“Magical realism doesn’t capture the character of this poetic and intelligent novel: its blurring of current events and myth is more subtle, more realistically grounded.” — Steve Tomasula, Review of Contemporary Fiction

“Anyone with experience in a Chinese community will be struck by how apt yet original Lu's observations are, of the ways in which Chinese culture interweaves spiritual and material beings.”—South China Morning Post

A contact lens dipped in tea stands in for Proust’s mnemonic madeleine in this agreeably deranged first novel, by a young California critic and teacher of film technique.

That association leaps naturally to mind as we follow the serpentine peregrinations of Cheng-Ming, a Chinese-American student living in Taipei, whose interest in the “world” of ghosts and spirits unsettles his own psyche just as a typhoon is approaching Taipei. Declaring himself a “scholar of the strange,” Cheng-Ming, who resides in a supposedly haunted apartment building, begins his own informal investigation into the case of “K,” a notorious rapist-murderer who airily eludes and teases the police (and who, the reader begins to suspect, may be the importunate Cheng-Ming’s criminal alter ego). Complications quickly multiply, in an R-rated Through the Looking Glass that involves Lu’s adventurous protagonist with an adipose “amateur documentarian” who may or may not be seeing things himself, the fortune-teller who performs the abovementioned ablution with Cheng-Ming’s contact, a forgotten filmmaker, a reclusive painter, and a clinically depressed medium, among others. Meanwhile, house pets mysteriously disappear and snakes slither through city streets, K’s body count piles up, and our hero narrowly escapes becoming the groom in a shotgun “spirit-marriage.” It seems churlish to insist on knowing what all this paranoiac splendor adds up to, but there are probably clues in a Buddhist parable about a cannibalistic ghost that appears to teach “that identity is an illusion.” It’s certainly an impudent parody of noir fiction, and perhaps also an allegorical swipe at a culture whose fervent traditionalism also accommodates healthy doses of superstition (“Because we live here, drowning in these myths, we attribute everything to spirits”).

More than a little precious, but quite likably stylish and amusing. And—not that this wouldn’t have already occurred to Alvin Lu—it might make a rather good movie. - Kirkus Reviews