Zhao Haohui's VALLEY OF TERROR (tr by Bonnie Huie), with a slight sidebar on StoryGraph

I spent a lot of time while reading Zhao Haohui's Valley of Terror feeling like I had been let down a bit by the people who'd recommended it to me last October, when I asked Twitter for a couple of "spooky reads in translation", but then I saw that something rather clever was going on.

I really couldn't tell, from chapter to chapter, whether I was reading a supernatural horror novel disguised as a Sherlock Holmesian* detective story, or a Sherlock Holmesian detective story disguised as a supernatural horror novel. Was there going to be a Scooby Doo "it was old man so-and-so with this bag of mundane tricks" ending or was it going to end in some kind of exorcism? 

The tension between these two possibilities was maintained almost until the last chapter! And this made up for what, for me, were still some pretty annoying flaws in the novel that I'll discuss a bit below. But overall, the effect earns Valley of Terror a WOW! from me.

But first, a bit about pace. I'm not usually a reader much concerned with pace, but as I've started migrating my book-tracking from the problematic and Tech Giant-owned GoodReads to The StoryGraph (so far not Tech Giant-owned, with a very different recommendation engine, and all the tasty bar and pie graphs a dork could ask for), I've been unable to avoid noticing it. Every time you mark a book as finished over there, you're asked to describe it in terms of moods ("challenging", "dark", "adventurous", "lighthearted" etc) and pace.

Now, this might be a whiplash effect from my previous read having been Marcel Proust's Swann's Way** but boy did Valley of Terror feel fast-paced. Zhao, at least as translated by Bonnie Huie, is all about the terse declarative sentence, the quick establishing description, and above all keeping the story moving. If you're looking for a brooding noir-ish crime read where the personal drama of the detective is half the story, this ain't it. We're dropped right into the action -- a plague of absolutely mind-shattering fear has descended upon a Chinese city, with at least two people dead before we've even finished meeting our detective, Chief Investigator Luo Fei (and learned how very respected he is; everybody, barring one character I'll talk about in a bit, is either very wise and learned with a shining reputation who commands awe and respect from everybody else, or is basically just a figurant there to express that awe and respect). One went tear-assing out of a college library late at night and ran six miles in 40 minutes, essentially running himself to death, dying with an appaling rictus of terror on his face; the other suddenly left a wedding where everybody else was having such a great time they didn't notice that he was scared out of his mind, so scared that he tried to hide his head and entire body in a toilet and drowned. Also with the rictus.

And really, I almost feel like I took longer than Haohui does in describing this set-up. Dude is snappy! As in lickety-split, our Sherlock Holmes-analogue, Luo, has picked up a Watson-analogue at the local university, renowned psychologist Dr. Zhou, who has a living patient on his hands with a problem very like what the corpses seem to have experienced. Except he doesn't speak Mandarin; he only speaks a minority language, Hamo. And they don't even know who he is! Every bit as resourceful as Holmes and Watson, but with greater resources, they turn to the internet to solve this dilemma, and again, almost before we know it, BOOM! A third team member appears in the form of fringe historian Yue Dongbei.

And here's where Valley of Terror first threatened to get tiresome, because there is a lot of cliched sparring between Respectable Scientist Zhou and Crackpot Yue, even though the Crackpot has actual insights into the case; he had hired the living patient to go into the Back of Beyond to investigate a paranormal legend for him!

Thankfully, though, here is also where things get really fascinating for the Western reader, because the paranormal legend involves a lot of very real Chinese history that this American, even though she took four years of Mandarin in college and has struggled mightily to preserve what fluency she attained by watching a lot of Mandarin-language TV and movies over the years, didn't know much about. 

Way back around the time that Charles I was making everybody angry in England, the Manchu were invading China, and their forces were duking it out with the Yongling emperor's over territory near the modern day nations of Myanmar and Laos, with the almost-defeated Yongling forces left to the charge of one very capable and resourceful leader, General Li Dingguo, after the emperor fled to Myanmar (Burma back then). Li led something between a guerilla campaign and a siege defense in a mountainous region for years, achieving feats of military brilliance and command of logistics, but coming to a tragic and lonely end.*** BUT! In Yue's version of this history it is commonly believed that Li's prowess and incredible feats of derring do were only possible because he could command actual demons! Demons which were devilishly hard to overcome, as was Li until finally he and his supernatural aid were trapped in a vial via his blood. The vial is now a terrible, sacred treasure that must be guarded, lest the terrible monster Li escape and reincarnate and seek revenge on Those Who Brought Him Low.

Centuries later, this vial was looted from the region, smuggled into our man Luo's home city, and was in the process of being sold by unscrupulous traders to a collector from Myanmar a few months before the first scared-to-deaths occurred. This shady transaction was interrupted by none other than Supercop Luo, who in the process had to fire his weapon and managed to break open the blood vial! Did something escape from that vial besides some really old but well-preserved blood? Something that, say, can elicit mind-shattering fear in any unlucky human it/they encounter? SPOOKY!

We're still not even like 1/8th of the way through the novel, here, by the way. Lightning pace! Next thing we know Luo, Zhou and Dongbei are off on an adventure to the village to which General Li retreated centuries ago, to find Li is worshipped by the rustic locals, all of whom are descended from his defeated troops, as a rain god. A local Big Man, Chief Bai, a descendant of General Li's lieutenants, keeps the cult alive through a Scooby Doo mechanism: when the locals pray for rain, they make offerings and perform a ceremony and, if the "rain god" is pleased, his statue "cries" tears supplied on the sly by one Chief Bai -- or rather, one of his assistants. Except just as our investigative trio turns up, that assistant turns up in a state of severe shock and the General Li statue is crying blood!

Does this sound like good, pulpy fun, or what? But wait, there's more! Like a remote village populated by a minority tribe, the Hamo (kind of maybe based on a real life tribal people of the region, the Miao, maybe?), speakers of the language Dr. Zhou's terrified babbling patient was babbling terrifiedly in and believers in a version of the legend of Li Dingguo in which he is a terrifying villain who could summon demons and inflict sanity-destroying terror on his foes. The local belief system is upheld by yet another chieftain type, descended from the mighty Hamo warrior who originally, legendarily, defeated Li and put his blood in the vial, and a beautiful priestess, formerly the keeper of this vial who is descended from the lovely woman who was integral to the original plot to bring Li to justice.

See? So pulpy! So fun!

Continued tiresome arguments between Dr. Zhou and Mr. Dongbei aside.

And the annoying tendency for Zhao to describe his characters' physcial appearance in moral terms; we don't really know what anybody looks like in terms we're used to in western fiction, but we are often told that someone has an "honest" or "forthright" face and this is only my second modern Chinese novel but is that really a convention of Chinese fiction, that there are facial physiognomies that automatically convey trustworthiness or the lack thereof? Because, yuck.

Oh, and Zhou is constantly having leaps of insight that we're meant to just run with like being able to tell from a faint and messy footprint in damp mud that a dude was six feet tall, which, yes, deduction is mighty, but we're not treated to any deductive reasoning here, the other characters just say something along the lines of oh yes, of course, you learned that in police training!

And like I said, for a lot of the time I spent reading this, I was pretty annoyed at all of this, until I noticed how well the Big Mystery, the tension I mentioned above, is kept suspended. And so no, I'm not going to tell you which it is, but I am going to tell you that if you like mysteries, want to explore a different setting (and by the way, Zhao is a pretty competent scenery pornographer; China's equivalent of a Tourism Bureau should be slipping him a little something something for making people want to come visit Hunnan; it sounds beautiful), or like their spooky mysteries laced with a lot of historical drama. I might check out more of Zhao's work one of these day.

*With this title, and a bit of dialogue early in the novel evoking yet another Holmes mystery, I can't help but thinking a bit of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Valley of Fear, eh wot?

**Which, yes, I'm finally going to read all of In Search of Lost Time/Remembrance of Things Past but no, I've decided I'm not going to inflict my thoughts about on this blog. Plenty of ink and pixels have been spilled on long dead Proust, most of it by people with smarter and more insightful things to say about it than I. Too long; didn't write: how did "Swann in Love" escape the 90s trend of adapting classic literature into a snappy teen movie? It's exactly a teen movie plot!

***I went down a bit of a rabbit hole on this but you know who really went down a rabbit hole on this? Zhao Haohui, who has a nifty afterword about it that basically tells the whole historical tale of General Li Dingguo and it's a pretty great story.