Former Communist rebels and Thai celebrations litter the tang pi or “The Ghost Way”, a book with a scary premise and some scarier moments.  Unfortunately, the stilted and robotic style makes reading difficult, and breaking it up into a series of 38 vignettes, while aesthetically interesting, leads to undeveloped or underdeveloped characters with whom I could not sympathize.  I read with a sense of detachment instead of fearing for our protagonists.

“The Ghost Way” tells the allegedly true story of the Ramanakajja’s haunted home near Asksala, Thailand during the 70s.  Eot and Jak Ramanakajja thought themselves lucky when they bought a low-priced new home for their growing family just outside their village.  But this was the repossessed home of drunkard and gambler Hute Ninchu who, after several attempts to intimidate the Ramanakajjas, performed a ritual that called his ancestral spirits, buried on the property, to chase away the intruders.  Ninchu did not realize that he had opened a portal that could not be shut and had called forth much more frightening spirits than his ancestors.  Thus we see the Ramanakajjas experience several horrifying incidents so constant that they soon cannot stay overnight in their own home.  They often pack up and run through the elephant grass and jungle to a relative’s home as they fight shape-shifting demons and angry spirits of dead villagers they once called friends.  The most terrifying stories belong to the other villagers who scoff at the Ramanakajja’s stories until they venture too close and experience the terror firsthand.

Indeed, the familiar horror theme of reaping what you sow applies here.  Joob Kodong, the same priest tasked with cleansing the home, wakes more angry spirits with his aggressive taunting and soon pays the price.  Dom Pokin and Chan Meesri, both notoriously violent men in the village, get in roadway accidents after teasing the spirits.  Meesri gets the added horror of a demon possessing him and driving him mad before his death.  The final victim of this karmic payback is Hute Ninchu himself.  He angered his ancestral spirits by waking them and removing the veil between the spirit world and our own.  As a consequence, he falls mortally ill before dying alone, and bad fortune follows the Ninchu family from then on.  The final chilling scene is a march of spirits claimed by the tang pi as the most vicious demon calls them forth and makes their mangled spirits bow to him.

Despite all of this, I did not care for these characters or the Ramankajjas.  The book is very matter of fact and an obvious translation made by Kung (author’s wife and Eot and Jak’s daughter; she vaguely remembers the hauntings).  It’s rhythm is staccato rather than flowing with little depth added to any of the characters and particularly the Ramankajjas.  I did not care that they were frightened from their home every night or that their daughter was almost killed because they were but names to me.  In fact, at the end, I truly disliked the family who cursed villagers for not warning them about Ninchu and the hauntings and then went ahead and sold their home to another young couple, who were eventually murdered by the demons possessing the land.  I thought them uninteresting and hypocritical at best.

“The Ghost Way” drops some interesting tidbits about Thai culture, history and politics here and there and has some legitimate, unsettling scares.  But it’s not well-executed and that makes even a short book like this one, (only a little over 100 pages) difficult to slog through.   I’d pass on this book and look elsewhere if you’re looking for something scary and engaging because this book promises plenty of scary but isn’t that engaging.