Input Junkie

This impressively weird dark fantasy/timeslip novel has three storylines. One follows Lee, a white American college student in the modern day. He too is impressively weird. He can tell when people are lying, he can hear other people's heartbeats, he sees bloodstains that no one else does, and he's addicted to over the counter sedatives like Benadryl to muffle his perceptions which are normally painfully acute. He's also very emo and obsessed with death. For a while I was convinced that he was a vampire.

When we meet Lee, he's fled to Kagoshima, Japan, where his father is living with his latest Japanese girlfriend in a historic samurai house. (Lee's mother disappeared in Cambodia under mysterious circumstances long enough ago to be legally dead; the official story is that she was taken by human traffickers.) The reason Lee fled is that he murdered his college roommate for reasons he can't recall, and also can't recall where he hid the body!

The second main storyline follows Sen, a girl Lee's age from a samurai family a hundred years ago, after the samurai were essentially outlawed. Her father took part in a failed rebellion in which everyone else was killed, and has fled with his family to the same house Lee is living in now. Her father, a traumatized abusive asshole, is plotting another rebellion, and so has very reluctantly agreed to let her study the sword as her brothers are too young. Sen is extremely devoted to the idea of dying nobly to impress her father.

The third storyline, which only gets a couple of interspersed chapters, is a retelling of the legend of Urashima Taro, a Japanese fairytale about a fisherman who rescues a turtle who is actually a princess, and visits her castle under the sea.

Sen and Lee both begin to see each other, initially believing the other is a ghost. The book really picks up once they start talking to each other. Lee thinks that since Sen is dead in his time, maybe she can help put him in touch with his dead mother. Sen is reluctantly willing to oblige once she repeatedly fails to kill the creepy foreign ghost, mostly because he's someone her own age who will talk to her. Their relationship is intensely romantic but not sexual, or possibly extremely intensely platonic. But the more Lee presses Sen to try to contact his mother, and the more involved Lee gets with the idea of saving Sen from her rapidly approaching glorious death in battle, the more weird and surreal things get.

Japanese Gothic was a working title that stuck, and the book is indeed extremely gothic. I enjoyed how unabashedly overheated, strange, and surreal it was. It feels like Baker had a great time writing it. There's a number of mysteries and I figured out some in advance, but I never, not in a million years, would have figured out how they all fit together. In fact, almost everything does fit together quite neatly by the end. That aspect and others reminded me a bit of Catriona Ward.

I really enjoyed this book. It's Baker's second novel. Her first is Bat-Eater and Other Names for Cora Zhang, which I am excited to read.

Content notes: Gore. Inventive methods of child abuse (very reminiscent of Catriona Ward). Cruelty to animals (wild hares) (ditto).