Published: April 14, 2026
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Series: NA
Genre: Horror
Pages: 347 (Kindle)
Synopsis:
In this lyrical, wildly inventive horror novel interwoven with Japanese mythology, two people living centuries apart discover a door between their worlds.
October, 2026: Lee Turner doesn’t remember how or why he killed his college roommate. The details are blurred and bloody. All he knows is he has to flee New York and go to the one place that might offer refuge—his father’s new home in Japan, a house hidden by sword ferns and wild ginger. But something is terribly wrong with the house: no animals will come near it, the bedroom window isn’t always a window, and a woman with a sword appears in the yard when night falls.
October, 1877: Sen is a young samurai in exile, hiding from the imperial soldiers in a house behind the sword ferns. A monster came home from war wearing her father’s face, but Sen would do anything to please him, even turn her sword on her own mother. She knows the soldiers will soon slaughter her whole family when she sees a terrible omen: a young foreign man who appears outside her window.
One of these people is a ghost, and one of these stories is a lie.
Something is hiding beneath the house of sword ferns, and Lee and Sen will soon wish they never unburied it.
Japanese Gothic was one of my random Kindle Deals purchases, mostly because I liked the title. The synopsis was also rather attention grabbing – a young man flees New York City to his father’s new home in Japan because he’s murdered his roommate. Or has he? There are also flashbacks to another POV character, Sen, who is a young woman trained to be a samurai in the last gasping breaths of the samurai age.
The two characters’ timelines intersect in a fascinating way. They actually are able to interact with one another and even touch one another thanks to this strange link in their respective timelines. Lee Turner wants to know how he might speak to other ghosts to find answers as to how his mother died. In exchange, he gives Sen some information about the coming days of her life and when exactly she will die. This is probably my favorite way two timelines could intersect because two characters living years apart genuinely being able to interact with one another almost never happens unless it’s a sci-fi time travel book.
This book kept me turning pages because I could never quite anticipate what would happen next. Lee is clearly an unreliable narrator from the start and even at that point in the story I was wondering if he truly killed his roommate or if he was having a psychotic break of some sort. Sen was a terribly tragic character. She was raised like a son, but with even harsher expectations because she was a daughter. Her father should have died in the samurai rebellion, but instead fled home and now his family hides and starves. It’s clear nothing good awaits the family, just a matter of when the other shoe will drop.
Overall, I thought Japanese Gothic was fascinating and delightfully suspenseful. It’s not my usual genre and honestly I didn’t love how things wrapped up. I almost wished there hadn’t been the clearly laid out supernatural element because I liked wondering how exactly these two people came to interact in the first place. I am glad I took a chance on this one because I did enjoy it and it was a nice change of pace from my usual genre choices!
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