The female ghost is a particularly enduring image, one that crosses borders and has spawned icons of horror films. These ghosts are usually long-haired, slender, and wearing dresses—their horror is practically hinged on these classic symbols of femininity, as though that in itself is shorthand: this is a woman with fury and bloodlust but none of the propriety to hold her back. Run.

“This house eats and is eaten,” begins Trang Thanh Tran’s debut gothic horror novel She Is A Haunting. The book opens with Jade, a closeted Vietnamese American girl who reluctantly travels to Vietnam for the first time to spend the summer in the colonial house her estranged father is renovating as a B&B–only to find that the house has other ideas.