Marshall Moore

Espresso Shots: Inhospitable, by Marshall Moore

Small-sized reviews, raves, and recommendations.

Lena Haze and her husband Lucas find themselves dealing with the financial windfall after they inherit a Hong Kong hotel in the gentrifying neighborhood of Wan Chai. Inhospitable by Marshall Moore is a ghost story where history, family, and murder converge. Lena, a Southern expat new to Hong Kong, has to deal with the twin challenges of culture shock and turning a rundown hotel into a boutique establishment pleasing to her investors. In addition Lena is a bit of a “ghost magnet.” Since childhood she has been able to communicate with the other side, or at least notice the after-effects of those haunting the realm in whatever comes after life. These can manifest themselves in cold spots in hallways, darkened hotel rooms during sunny days with the shades open, and voices invading her mind.

After an initial meeting with investors Jessica and Roger Lo, Lucas returns back to the US to tie up loose ends. Lena, overwhelmed with the tasks ahead, recruits the son of Jessica and Roger, Isaac, as her assistant. Like Lena, he is also a ghost magnet. He shows her to a restaurant with a particularly hungry ghost. Prior to all this, Lena witnesses a double suicide with a brother and sister plummeting to the street. In the chaos she meets a fellow expat – and fellow Southerner – Claire.

As the novel progresses, we plumb deeper and deeper into family trauma, moral flexibility, and ghosts seeking revenge for past political crimes. Moore gives Inhospitable a delicious literary polish, elevating it beyond the usual genre fare. But what does “literary” mean in the context of a Hong Kong ghost story? In the Acknowledgments, he explains how the novel was part of the requirements for a PhD. in Creative Writing. Luckily the novel doesn’t come across as an over-workshopped piece of literary preciousness. In the realm of genre fiction, it means avoiding cliché and convention. The narrative chugs along and characters possess arcs both believable and organic to the storytelling. I’m not a reader of ghost stories and horror, but Moore created a plausible supernatural world. He filled in the gaps to things that could chalked up as unexplained or peculiar. Beyond constructing a plausible world, every so often the prose popped with a quality bon mot.

The writing is smart, not showboating cleverness for its own sake (see Whedon, Joss, and Sorkin, Aaron). Lena’s critique of her architecture firm: “All right angles and smooth surfaces. His ideas for the exterior of the building were similarly austere: variations on a generic Holiday Inn in Antarctica.” Glad I’m not the only one who finds coolhunter minimalism incredibly boring. When she has to tell her husband about the hauntings in the hotel, “What did a supernatural warning matter when this much money was at stake? What else were they supposed to do, stay in America and join the rest of the middle class on its downward spiral into articulate, self-aware poverty?” Probably the best sentence I’ve read in years, almost Cioran-esque in its acid-edged ferocity.

Beyond the rapier wit and worldbuilding, Moore’s Hong Kong feels real and live-in. The sounds and smells and feel of the place makes reading the novel an act of virtual travel. From posh districts to dangerous back-alleys, Inhospitable is an adventure involving this life and the next. But like any good ghost story it goes from the supernatural guests being nuisances to realms dark and dangerous. Lena has to contend with visitors who pose an inconvenience to a confrontation with evil. This is less about jump scares than the thing you might have saw out of the corner of your eye or the unexplained bangs and bumps happening in the night when you’re the only one in bed.… (más)

Inhospitable is a ghost story with a steel magnolia at its center. Lena Haze is in Hong Kong, a city of ghosts, retrofitting the hotel her husband Marcus inherited while he remains back home in North Carolina to sell their home and tie up loose ends. Lena is well-suited for Hong Kong, despite her misgivings, as she has a long history with ghosts, first her sister and then an annoying “Marauder” at a hotel she managed. Seeing a ghost woman ordering at a table near her at a nearby restaurant doesn’t send her screaming for the exits. It helps that her assistant Isaac is also tuned into the ghosts and is willing to guide her in Hong Kong’s ghostly culture.

The book is organized into three parts, Arrival, Restoration, and Occupation. This is Lena’s journey with the hotel, arriving in Hong Kong, restoring the business, and moving it and opening its doors. It is also a good description of the ghosts, the ones she meets early on, the one that seems to want to connect with her, and the one that occupies the hotel. It’s a life or death struggle and ghosts don’t play fair. But then, neither does Lena.

I enjoyed Inhospitable even though I am not fond of ghost stories, a lingering byproduct of a failed Baptist upbringing, I’m sure. The sense of menace built slowly and inexorably, but it created a real sense of jeopardy. What I liked best, though, was Lena. She’s a tough cookie and while she may communicate with ghosts and all, but she’s not into the trappings of the supernatural. She’s a thoroughly modern ghost whisperer without crystal balls and ouija boards. I also love the friendship that developed between Lena and Isaac, the ironical gay son of Lena and Marcus’ big investors.

Marshall Moore writes with colorful and inventive language. I noted his beautiful writing in “Hong Kong Noir“, a short story anthology I read earlier this year. Most of the time this is good. However, sometimes he tries too hard. Let me give one example, “She drank another cup of wakefulness to help her get through this cervix of a day.” A cup of wakefulness instead of a cup of coffee is a brilliant use of metaphor; but cervix of a day is not. In fact, it left me flummoxed, wondering where in the hell that came from. I put he book down and had that question noodling away in the back of my mind all day.

After all, people do use dick as a metaphor. A dick of a day has its own entry in the Urban Dictionary. But cervix of a day is not some feminist analog. Women don’t have cervix measuring contests and get into fistfights about the size of their cervix. No presidential debate has featured a conversation about whether some woman’s cervix is a normal size. You can call a man a dick, but no one calls a woman a cervix. It’s just so weird. Too weird and evidence of trying too hard. Of course, it didn’t ruin the book for me. An entire novel shouldn’t be derailed by one bad metaphor, but it did change how I read the book…so I was more alert to the use of metaphor, a distraction from the plot and character development. Metaphor should make the story richer, but it should never distract and take the focus off the story.

Still, I liked Lena. I liked Isaac. I even liked some of the ghosts, and overall, I liked Inhospitable.

I received an ARC of Inhospitable from the publisher.

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2019/06/14/9781788691512/… (más)

The quality of any fiction anthology tends to vary greatly from one story to the next. Not so with this remarkably consistent collection of Hong Kong fiction.

Although the cliché view of the former British colony is it's a place where money is number one - a perspective these stories don't seek to challenge - and the arts come second, these writers are no bunch of amateurs playing at writing and seeking to show off. Their various credits include appearing amongst the pages of the South China Morning Post and Granta, founding the Asia Literary Review and being a genuine bestseller.

Before the stories, the introduction raises pertinent questions about what constitutes a Hong Kong people and justifies why the anthology is in English rather than Cantonese, a fact that might otherwise seem like a colonial hangover.

There's no standout star in this collection, but the stories are uniformly of a decent standard. Only 'The Seventh Year', with its slightly melodramatic tone threatens to completely disappoint; though even that is redeemed, somewhat, by its amusing conclusion.

If there's a strong criticism to be made, it's not about the quality of the prose, rather the cheap endings that abound. 'The Troubled Boyhood of Baldwin Wong', in particular, finishes abruptly. It's true, we reach the end of Baldwin's childhood by the conclusion, and a beguiling ride it is, but much is unresolved and we're left hoping for a sequel to tell the rest of the story. Many of the tales take the easy way out, ending before having to deal with the consequences of previous words, though the authors can be forgiven due to word counts and the constraints of space.

Whilst these stories bring to life immigrant domestic helpers, wizened grave sweepers, the city's old, its spoilt youth, its transitory expat population and its established money, it would be nice if the stories had wider perspectives aside from their protagonists. Tales are repeatedly superstitious, set on HK Island, and laden with talk of money and/or property. Socialist yarns of migrant workers living in a New Territories village might not make for a better tale, but it's surprising that a majority of the stories are so narrowly focused.

Ultimately this is nitpicking, though, since these stories, wherever they're set and whoever they focus on, are entertaining reads that prove Hong Kong has a vibrant literary scene that persists despite the SAR's business-first mindset and hectic way of life. As far as introductions to modern Hong Kong fiction go, you can't do much better than this.… (más)

While I first knew Marshall Moore for his An Ideal for Living, publisher with an LGBT press, this collection of short stories is not specifically LGBT, even if many of the characters are lesbian, bisexual or gay. The “extraordinariness” of these characters is not given by their sexuality, but lies on how much twisted they are. By the way, reading the blurb, I was expecting for this to be a collection of supernatural stories, but it’s actually a mix, and some of them are about the extraordinaire ordinariness of modern time. It’s difficult to explain, but it’s not something from outside that makes these men and women special, it’s all in them, in their mind, in their attitude: they stand apart, estranged from the contest where they are living.

And the contest is another important point: being it Portland, or Hong Kong, or San Francisco, the setting is at the same time outside frame and part of the story; Urban Reef would be not the same if not in Portland, and of course Marble Forest, Karstic Heart can be like that only in chaotic Hong Kong. In most of the stories, the cities blend with the characters, reflecting their own peculiarity, in some other stories, the setting is in stark contrast with the people (Urban Reef), making it the starting point of the narration.

The Infernal Republic is a far detour from my usual genre, similar experience I had with An Ideal for Living, but in both cases, I’m glad I gave a chance to this author, because for sure the esthetical beauty of his writings drew me all the same. I strongly suggest you to read him in the original English, but if you are not able to, and want to experience a little bit of what The Infernal Republic is, three of the stories are translated into Italian, ("Toast, Belladonna, and the Heat Death of the Universe", "Putting the Damage On", "The Infinite Monkey Theorem") and are available as “Il look del diavolo” from Signal 8 Press.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/9881516404/?tag=elimyrevandra-20… (más)