NEEDLEMOUTH, by K-Ming Chang
“You can either be good, or you can be alive,” says the title character in “Needlemouth,” a novel by the master fabulist K-Ming Chang. At once demon, mother, daughter and vampire, Needlemouth poses this conundrum to three cousins whom she is offering the chance to avoid the inherited suffering of their bloodline — as long as they are willing to kill for their own freedom.
Cindy is spending the summer with her cousins Mandy and Yangyang in the home of their dead grandmother, Ama, where they live with their mothers, Cindy’s aunts. Their ages are left vague, but Mandy is the oldest, the trio’s cynical de facto leader and self-appointed protector; Cindy is curiously devoid of memories, including of her own mother back home; and Yangyang, the youngest, escapes her grief for Ama by insulating herself deep in her fantasies.
One night, Cindy awakes to find a strange woman kneeling naked beside her bed, her mouth “a glowing hole the size of a needle-tip.” A ghost who died without descendants, “abandoned by the living” and hungry for human connection, Needlemouth makes a bold proposition: “Adopt me as your mother. Your ancestor. Gift me some of your blood so that I might at last have a lineage.”
For Cindy, it is an opportunity to disrupt the pattern of generational trauma handed down from her maternal line, from women who were forced to sacrifice their happiness and autonomy for their husbands and children. “From the moment she was born,” Chang writes, “death dwelled in Ama, eating her inch by inch, limb by limb, until she was nobody, selfless, somebody’s wife and mother, a being of grief.”
But of course there’s a catch: To complete this transaction, Cindy must kill Needlemouth’s angry, abusive father. Despite having no idea who this man is or where to find him, she intends to try.
At once a densely symbolic fairy tale and a harrowing family drama, what follows is a fever dream in which the distinctions among world building, hallucination and metaphor are easily, perhaps deliberately confused. A philosophical allegory in the vein of Hermann Hesse’s “Siddhartha” or Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” “Needlemouth” asks the reader to keep one eye always on the larger metaphysical questions, making it difficult to ever get truly lost in the story.
“All lineages follow the father,” Needlemouth tells Cindy in one of many dialogues throughout the novel that show the depth of Chang’s preoccupation with these themes: “But we have made another kind of line. A line that strings me to you, wound to wound.” Unfortunately, the novel’s action and backstory never fully illuminate the source of those wounds.
Readers of Chang’s previous work — including her debut novel, “Bestiary,” and the story collection “Gods of Want” — will find all her hallmarks present here: the powerful, complicated bonds among maternal figures and young women; an unflinching use of abject imagery and grotesque sensory detail; a troubling of the boundary between the animal and the human; and a layering of past and future events onto the present action, suggesting the circularity and simultaneity of time.
The nightmarish worlds the cousins must pass through on their quest to find and murder Needlemouth’s father are filled with excrement, viscera and bodily effluence; but still every sentence is a pleasure to read, even — or perhaps especially — the most disgusting ones. Chang challenges us not to avert our gaze from the filth of living, her language making our experience of the book a somatic journey in itself.
The novel arrives at several stunning moments that force characters to reckon with the traditions they’ve been raised in and the promises they’ve made, to Needlemouth and to themselves. Blood lust transforms. Rebellion reorients. And in the end we’re asked to consider if the desires for destruction and for care might, in fact, be one and the same.
NEEDLEMOUTH | By K-Ming Chang | Simon & Schuster | 269 pp. | $28
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