The Hell Screens [Hardcover]

Alvin Lu (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 30, 2000

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.

Editorial Reviews

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.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 238 pages
• Publisher: Four Walls Eight Windows (November 30, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 156858167X
• ISBN-13: 978-1568581675
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,333,120 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Cultural Collisions: Locus, Taipei, April 22, 2001

By 

Lucas Klein (Beijing) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Hell Screens (Hardcover)

When we in the western world think of China and Chinese spritiual beliefs, we tend to think of the lone sage meditating on the fog-entrenched mountains with lush pine greenery supplying the mist for his mysterious knowledge. Such an image is, of course, more two-dimensional than the brush-paintings we have seen this sage inhabit.

In the noise and chaos and odors of the city--and not just any city, this is the simultaneously more modernly western and traditionally eastern Taipei, Taiwan--and see what "spirit" means to the authentic characters in Alvin Lu's novel "Hell Screens". By the end of the novel, if you've paid attention, you notice that everything has come together in a hodge-podge of past & present, colonialism and nativism, body and spirit, and, yes, life and death.

This is no simple novel. Many times I found myself scratching my head, or my chin, wondering if this book were taking me anywhere I could afford to go. If I had not ever lived in Taipei myself, I probably wouldn't have picked up this novel. But now that I have, and have been forced to read it with both my eyes open & still not know if my contact lenses have been cursed or blessed, I can only recommend this book to anyone who doesn't balk at letting the head swim while the world (oh, but which world?) explodes.

I can't prove it, but I think the narrator's name Cheng-ming is a reference to the Confucian concept of the Rectification of Names. If yours is a world where such alleged rectification has long-ago shattered, leaving you to sweep up the pieces, then buy a plane-ticket to Taipei and bring this book along with you.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Obsessive Horror, February 13, 2001

By 

Marc Ruby™ "The Noh Hare™" (Warren, MI USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Hell Screens (Hardcover)

Alvin Lu has written a first novel that inextricably combines a rich and unnerving spirit world with the very real actions of an elusive serial murderer. The result is the kind of labyrinthine story telling which never fails to entrance.

Set in modern Taipei, the story is ostensibly the tale of Cheng-Ming, a Chinese-American researcher who is drawn into and seduced by the superstitions and myths of the city. We are treated to an ever darker study of of the Oriental spirit world, as we move through layers of myth and malevolence. This world intrudes upon and is intruded on by modern Taipei. We see ceremonies in sneakers and sacred comic books. Signs and portents appear everywhere.

The novel is tremendously atmospheric, gaining momentum as the world he moves thru gradually overwhelms Cheng-Ming's westernized sensibilities. At some point Cheng-Ming ceases to be an academic in search of signs and clues and becomes an obsessive seeker after knowledge which is always just beyond his reach.

The Hell Screens is far more than the typical serial killer horror story, combining the raw action and realities of murderous violence with a refined psychological study of a wanderer in the mist. Prepare for a truly unusual, enjoyable experience.