In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Kim Fu’s The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts is a gloriously unsettling novel of real estate and loneliness.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“Alluring. . . . a vivid portrait of mental fragility in the face of such an overwhelming situation, one that will resonate with any new homeowner.”
In their own words, here is Kim Fu’s Book Notes music playlist for their novel The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts:
In my early twenties, I would sometimes draft whole essays and poems in a kind of blackout fugue state. I would fall into a trance, words pouring forth uncontrollably, and emerge twenty minutes or several hours later with no recollection of time passing in the room I was in—no memory of the daylight fading, trash bins being collected outside the window, other people coming and going from my communal library table. Writing fiction, however, has almost always had a more intentional, workmanlike quality. Drafting a novel or story might involve bursts of this kind of immersion, lost to the world, but many more hours of sitting down to do the work, problem-solving, the rational mind churning alongside the irrational.
The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts, my third novel and fifth book, was an exception. I have almost no memory of writing the first draft. I remember, in December of 2023, telling a writer friend that I was abandoning the novel I had been working on for years—in that more typical, dogged, brick-by-brick way—to write…something, a slippery compulsion that was literally haunting my dreams. (“Don’t do that,” she’d replied, sensibly.) I remember, the following May, writing my brilliant editor at Tin House, Masie Cochran, to say I had an early draft to show her. But in between, I was mostly absent, either gone to that indescribable, amnesiac place or restless to return to it.
Consequently, I don’t remember what I was listening to. I know I often wrote in coffee shops without headphones, to whatever playlists the baristas chose, to milk steaming and other people’s conversations. At home, I know Swan Lake, the full discography of Beach House, and the In the Mood for Love soundtrack have long been go-tos for me while writing, as music just generally swollen with drama and emotion.
In The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts, the main character, Eleanor, buys a home in a stalled-out housing development in the mountains, where only two homes were ever completed. She is stricken with grief after the death of her codependent, coddling mother, and isolated geographically and emotionally. An endless rain begins to flood the valley, the water seeping through the walls of her house, loosening her grip on reality, animating past traumas and ghosts. In assembling this playlist now, in 2026, I tried to think of music that brings me back to the atmosphere of the setting—to the gouged-out mountains and oppressive rain, the black-eyed stare of deer, the melting paint and weeping windows—and Eleanor’s crumbling state of mind.
“All you are going to want to do is get back there” – The Caretaker, An Empty Bliss Beyond This World (2011)
An Empty Bliss Beyond This World uses samples of prewar parlor room music—light piano and muted brass bands that suggest a tea party or informal dance in the 1930s, chopped and looped and heavily artifacted—the pops and scratches of vinyl, echoes, pulses reminiscent of footsteps or a heartbeat. Phrases repeat, linger, trail off, stop abruptly, drift across the stereo audio channels, and frequently feel like they’re being played in another room, at the end of a distant tunnel, through a fading radio signal, or from the bottom of the sea. Leyland Kirby (known as The Caretaker for this project) cites as inspirations the ballroom scene in The Shining and a 2010 study about Alzheimer’s patients’ ability to recall music. It’s the most ghostly, disquieting music I’ve ever heard.
“Everybody Scream” – Florence + the Machine, Everybody Scream (2026)
An early reader of The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts told me she started reading late at night, alone in the basement of her parents’ rambling house in the suburbs. She said she was so frightened she had to stop, and could only resume reading upstairs in the daylight. I love this anecdote, because I’m worried about the opposite experience—Valley is not really a horror novel, and I think lovers of genre horror who expect that will be disappointed by how not scary it is. I was inspired by mid-twentieth-century writers like Shirley Jackson and Daphne du Maurier (and, more recently, Bitter Orange by Claire Fuller), who didn’t write horror in quite the way we think of it now—they boil you slowly in tension and unease, in the memory or potential for violence more than its gory, on-page presence.
“Everybody Scream” plays with recognizable motifs of horror as Valley does—pipe organ music, eerie choral vocals, howling female screams. But it is ultimately (to me) a very personal song about the demands of stardom and womanhood, the transcendence of art colliding with the limitations of the human body. Valley is a haunted house story, but it is much more a study in loss and loneliness, a portrait of the broken systems of modern life.
“Empires Never Know” – Jessica Pratt, Here in the Pitch (2024)
Here in the Pitch is a wonderful album for traveling—for road trips, buses, and trains, the world passing through the window. But in “Empires Never Know,” the reverb-heavy, ethereal quality of Jessica Pratt’s voice—sun-drunk and warm on the other tracks—sounds unusually sad and creepy, even garbled, the backing instruments warped and nostalgic.
Eleanor initially has reason to drive back and forth between the city and her new, remote home. She yearns for connection, seeking replacement family in a former mentor and his wife, and later an ex-boyfriend and his mother. But she always ends up returning to the valley, with no neighbors for miles, enclosed again by the hostile and increasingly surreal surroundings. I can imagine this song playing on her car stereo as she takes the last turn onto the unmarked road.
“The Beast” – Anna von Hausswolff, Iconoclasts (2025)
The instrumental opening track to Iconoclasts begins with a cool saxophone riff—driving, determined, catchy. The song slowly builds and builds to an almost unbearable tension, growing denser with instrumentation, the repeating phrase unresolved. Fluttery woodwinds become dissonant industrial noise, a held synth, an overwhelming wall of sound—which itself then melts away into something softer, gentler, ambiguous, the saxophone returning like a changed person. It accomplishes all of this in three minutes and eleven seconds. Without spoiling anything, I hope this is the arc of the journey that Eleanor and the reader go on together, and I hope I’ve done it as succinctly.
“Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat Minor, op. 23” – Tchaikovsky (1875)
Besides the children’s folk song “There’s a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea” and a couple purely fictional creations, this is the only actual, named song in the book. It scores a pivotal moment; a character plays it at ear-splitting volume on a tape deck to drown out the sound of an angry mob pounding on his door, and the sound of a gunshot. He may already be dead. (Look, things get weird.) He’s a secondary character in the book, but he thinks of himself as the main character of the universe. He’s representative of undeserved and excessive power, billionaire audacity, deeply in love with himself. The pure bombast and emotionality of this concerto just sounded like him.
“Autumn” – Joshua Bonnetta, The Pines (2025)
This one is going to seem like cheating. Joshua Bonnetta recorded over 8000 hours of audio on a microphone strapped to a single pine tree in upstate New York, then edited it down to four hour-long tracks named for each season. The creaking of branches, the twittering of birds, the crunch of gravel. A cry that might be human or animal. The patter and rush and drone of wind and rain. On its own, I think The Pines can be a contemplative, transporting, even relaxing experience. As a companion to The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts, I feel like I can hear rainwater soaking through clothes, through skin, chilling to the bone.
“The Milky Sea” – Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Gift Songs (2025)
It sounds like the rain.
“Shockwave” – Wata Igarashi, My Supernova (2025)
It sounds like madness.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Kim Fu’s playlist for their novel For Today I Am a Boy
Kim Fu is the author most recently of The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts (Tin House/Zando).