Wellington, 1923, and a sixty-year-old woman hangs herself in a scullery; ten years later another woman ‘falls’ from the second floor of a Taranaki tobacconist; soon afterwards a young mother in Taumarunui slices the throat of her newborn with a cleaver.
All are women of the Chinese diaspora, who came to Aotearoa for a new life and suffered isolation and prejudice in silence. Chinese Pākehā writer Lee Murray has taken the nine-tailed fox spirit húli jīng as her narrator to inhabit the skulls of these women and others like them and tell their stories.
Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud is an audacious blend of biography, mythology, horror and poetry that transcends genre to illuminate lives in the shadowlands of our history.
Dark bleatings, my lovely tribe! I’m excited to be here talking about this spectacular book from Lee Murray today. It’s interesting in its format in that it’s a short story collection (with a poetic flair), threaded together through the central narrator of the mythological fox spirit. In the foreword, Geneve Flynn describes this work as “an attempt to trace the voyage from the past to the present and to examine identity”, and it certainly does that.
Usually when I review a collection, I talk specifically about my few favourite stories but I simply can’t do that here. The whole thing is, in short, an emotional masterpiece. It’s raw, extremely disturbing, beautiful, and thought-provoking. I will say that it won’t be for every horror reader – it is NOT a light read, particularly because of the biographical inclusions. However, for those who do appreciate this particular type of fiction, I think you will love and respect it just as much as I do.
We observe and become entangled in stories of female endurance, the minimisation of women (by themselves, as well as others) out of necessity as well as because of misogyny, and intense pain. We experience stories in which women are worthless to those around them (beyond childbearing), the struggles of language and culture barriers, and medical neglect.
We see the types of men that many women fear, through the eyes of those women, and those stories in particular kept my heart lodged in my mouth. There is some deeply upsetting material here, written by someone tremendously skilled in communicating things that the less eloquent of us feel like we’re just screaming into deaf ears.
It’s an outstanding piece of work and I’d recommend it to people who are looking for something deeply emotive. If you’d like to check out the author or the book, there are some links below for you:
Bleeeat!
Happy Goat Horror 
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