Poetic & pointed…yet elusive? An interesting queer ghost story that both made sense and made no sense at all. Weird girl lit fic for SURE.

This is the stuff. It had me at "queer Taiwanese-American micro-retelling of Wuthering Heights", honestly.

The writing is stunning and strange and I may have to read it again immediately.

Note to self: Read [b:Wuthering Heights|6185|Wuthering Heights|Emily Brontë|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388212715l/6185._SY75_.jpg|1565818] before reading this. And do it by early 2022. OK, thank you, me.
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10/23 Update: I am finally reading [b:Wuthering Heights|6185|Wuthering Heights|Emily Brontë|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388212715l/6185._SY75_.jpg|1565818]!
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I began this a day after finishing Wuthering Heights as Brontë's classic serves as a basis for Chang's chapbook of mini-stories (a queer, modernized, pseudo-retelling of WH put out by micropress Bull City as part of their quarterly Inch magazine, which focuses on the work of a single writer in each issue). Even though it's an incredibly slim read, this is one where I think reading the reference novel is probably essential for enjoying it to the full extent. Chang leans heavily into the haunting aspect of the original, adding a different cultural/sexuality/gender twist, but creating her own contemporarily gothic atmosphere in rather lyrical fashion. Quite enjoyable and powerful enough to make me seek out Chang's full-length novels.

is she the most brilliant author of our time? I say yes.

‘Some desires are only legible in the dark.’

Stories can be a house into which we are welcomed inside. We lounge upon the finery of prose that decorates and dazzles each room and hallway of emotion. Later as we peer back through the windows of the narrative, we find the world changed through its beveled glass, the landscape awash in the creeping shadow of the house. Such fresh perspectives have long been said to be found in [a:Emily Brontë|4191|Emily Brontë|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1529578586p2/4191.jpg]’s classic novel [b:Wuthering Heights|6185|Wuthering Heights|Emily Brontë|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388212715l/6185._SY75_.jpg|1565818], a story which, interestingly enough, was once described by author [a:David Markson|10747|David Markson|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1238041034p2/10747.jpg] as being mostly about people are ‘continually looking in and out of windows.’ Not content to merely gaze in and out of the Heathcliff home, K-Ming Chang throws open the shutters to climb inside and remake the novel as her own in Bone House. Renovating the Brontë’s story with a toolbelt of exquisite prose, this modern day queer retelling features Taiwanese-Americans caught in a cycle of deep desires, both of passionate yearnings and a ‘desire to be disintegrated’ intertwined so tightly one can hardly find the seams. Fresh yet familiar, Bone House brings its guests and ghosts through a fraught history and towards a conclusion that will clench your heart in Chang’s brilliant vision.

‘Its the way she says Cathy that makes me listen, the way a woman pleads to any deity that has dammed all her prayers, redirected them to death. A woman deboned of hope.’

I cannot in good conscience say anything further without ranting about how absolutely astonishing the prose that pours from K-Ming Chang is in this retelling. It weaves before the readers eyes as if to hypnotize you in its beauty, arriving so assured yet haunted as it delivers such delightfully visceral imagery such as ‘water foaming in the pipes like a mouthful of rabies,’ or a ‘silver sky so bright he sutured his eyes.’ Each page is drips pure gems of poetic expression and it is no surprise to learn that Chang is also an accomplished poet as well as an author (you can read her poetry here). While this is only a short story, the power of the prose builds a structure far greater than its page length and readers will come away feeling as fulfilled and overcome by its narrative as they would a full length novel.

‘Another word for lesbian is: devourer of the dark.’

I adored the queer retelling aspects as well as the cultural shift from Brontë’s original and while Chang uses the bones of the classic she bestows a flesh and life that is all her own. Here Heathcliff is transformed as Millet, a baby girl abandoned above international waters between Taiwan and the US, and her rival for Cathy’s affections is not Edgar but Edie, a woman with a ‘star-spangled surname’ from the Arizona desert.

‘Millet is the field beneath my feet, is how I walk the world, she is the hinge in my knee when I lower myself for prayer, but Edie is the thing I pray up to.’

Chang brings us through a history of relationships flowing with self-destructive impulses—Edie ‘disturbed by this part of Cathy, the quills in her, the part that wanted Millet to strangle her so that she could shingle herself with stars’—while the present spirals through visions of ghosts in garments of modern gothic. It grips you as tightly as Millet’s hands around Cathy’s neck.

‘Cathy believed that the more she and Edie thirsted, the deeper their roots would snare inside each other. They would find inside each other’s bodies all the water they wanted.’

Chang’s Bone House is far more than a retelling as much as it reads as far more than a simple short story. There is a freshness here that speaks to immigrant family culture, lesbian desires, and a ghostly hope that brings us to a new ending that plays the reader’s heartstrings like a violin. There is excellent thematic motifs with water—water that is life giving but also ‘can raft my bones and colonize them with rot’—or its absence. The desert drains, the people have fake flowers, the people ‘don’t want anything that dies for real.’ However, death cannot be escaped, though in dodging it we often wonder ‘what have I lost to live?’ Brilliantly told and as haunting as the home in which the ghosts inhabit, Bone House is an impeccable tale.

5/5

‘Come tether us together, come flood us a future.’