The Hell Screens

Cheng-Ming, a Chinese American, rummages through the used-book stalls and market bins of Taipei. His object is no ordinary one - he's searching obsessively for accounts of ghosts and spirits, suicides and murders in a city plagued by a rapist-killer and less tangible forces. Cheng-Ming is an outsider trying to unmask both the fugitive criminal and the otherworld of spiritual forces that are inexorably taking control of the city. Things get complicated when the fetid island atmosphere begins to melt his contact lenses and his worsening sight paradoxically opens up the teeming world of ghosts and chimeras that surround him. Vengeful and anonymous spirits commandeer Cheng-Ming's sight, so that he cannot distinguish past from present, himself from another. Images from modern and colonial Taiwan - an island of restless spirits - assail Cheng-Ming even as they captivate the reader.

From Publishers Weekly

At one point in this uncanny novel, the narrator, Ch ng-ming, describes his literal absorption into a Buddhist temple mural: "Particles of dispersed light seeped into my pores so that I became indistinguishable from them. The more I looked, the more I found myself enclosed in the mural's world." Enclosure in an unreal world is the threat that hangs over all of modern-day Taipei, at least as Ch ng-ming lives it. Lu's debut novel is divided between two notebooks, the first recording 19 days during which Ch ng-ming, a Chinese-American, investigates a master criminal named K. who is on the loose in the city; the other, much shorter, is by K. himself. The quest for K. leads Ch ng-ming to interview Sylvia, a school girl who claims to have been K.'s lover. Sylvia, a fortune teller, says she and K. committed double suicide, except that the pills didn't kill her. Fatty, a ghost-obsessed filmmaker, is making a documentary about Wang, an exorcist who is supposedly driving the spirits from the apartment building in which Ch ng-ming lives. Ch ng-ming learns from Fatty that Sylvia is herself a vampiric ghost. After K. is discovered using a vacant apartment in Ch ng-ming's building, the narrative veers into a rapid dematerialization of reality. Fatty is murdered, and the police use Wang to make a sort of extrasensory investigation, implicating Sylvia. Although sometimes stylistically overburdened, the novel is a hypnotic venture into the uncertain reality of liminal existences. Sophisticated readers on the lookout for fresh literary talent will relish Lu's ambitious debut. (Nov. 16) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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