Japanese Gothic

 By: Kylie Lee Baker  

Location: FIC BAK

Genre: Horror

It’s sensational, eerie, mind-bending, emotionally layered, and so beautifully written that you feel every whisper, every shadow, every blade. I wholeheartedly recommend it. I’m certain this will stand as one of the best fantasy horror releases of 2026

Outstanding review by Nilifer Ozmikek

A mind-exploding, bone-shivering gothic nightmare wrapped in Japanese mythology, samurai legacy, and time-bending terror — this book is an exquisitely strange, intoxicating, and utterly original experience. It’s the kind of story that freezes your blood like black ice while melting your last remaining brain cells with its wild, labyrinthine twists. If you’re open to something daringly unique, unsettling, and beautifully crafted, this novel delivers a literary punch straight to the soul.

At its core, the story follows two young people separated by centuries yet bound by a single impossible door — a door that threads together their tragedies, their families, and their destinies. The same house. The same threshold. Two different eras.

The first timeline begins in October 2026. Lee Turner is spiraling after a horrifying blackout: he’s convinced he killed his college roommate James… yet he can’t remember how, why, or what he did with the body. With panic clawing at his throat and pills numbing his memories, Lee flees to Japan, where his father has just purchased an isolated house swallowed by sword ferns and wild ginger. All he can do is wait — wait for the police to call, wait for the body to surface, wait for the truth he fears will crush him.

But the house has other plans for him.

While Lee tries to navigate the suffocating tension with his father and his father’s unsettling girlfriend — who keeps whispering horrific folktales like they’re family heirlooms — something truly impossible happens. A window appears where no window has ever been. And behind it stands a young Japanese girl holding a sword, her expression sharp enough to slice through the barrier of time.

Her name is Sen.

Sen lives in 1877, in the same house, with her mother, her brother, and her samurai father — a man exiled after the fall of the samurai and hunted by imperial soldiers. Sen trains relentlessly under his harsh expectations. Honor is her currency. Obedience is survival. Earning her father’s approval means everything.

When she realizes she is a ghost from the past — and that her death is only days away — Sen accepts her fate with a warrior's discipline. But she seeks one final thing: an honorable end worthy of her father’s praise.

As their worlds collide through the doorway, Lee and Sen form a fragile, haunting connection. Lee wants her help to reach the spirit of his mother, who vanished in Cambodia and was presumed dead. If he can connect with Sen, perhaps he can connect with the one ghost who has haunted him since childhood.

But digging for truth — in any century — always comes with a price.

And sometimes the secrets waiting behind the veil are far more monstrous than the horrors already consuming their lives.
The real terror isn’t the ghosts. It’s the truth.

Overall, while a few twists are somewhat foreseeable, the atmosphere of walking through a fog-choked forest with no map is the book’s greatest strength. The slow burn works beautifully, and the integration of Japanese folklore — the legend of Urashima Tarō, the sorrowful tale of Otohime — adds a shimmering, haunting layer that binds everything together. The mythology doesn’t just enhance the story; it becomes its heartbeat.

I adored the chilling ambiance, the exploration of dysfunctional family dynamics, and the aching loneliness that drives these characters toward each other. There’s a raw fragility beneath the terror that makes this novel more than horror — it becomes a tragic meditation on identity, devotion, and the dangerous things we inherit.

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From Sunday Times bestselling author Kylie Lee Baker comes a wildly inventive take on the much-loved haunted house horror interwoven with Japanese mythology, where two people living centuries apart discover a door between their worlds.

2025
Lee can't remember exactly where he hid the body, but he can remember the blood. Hiding out at his father's centuries-old home in Japan, Lee knows something is wrong with him, and he knows it has something to do with his mother's disappearance almost a decade ago.

1877
A female samurai, Sen, stalks the borders of her home to protect her family from slaughter after the abolition of the samurai class. She's not sure how they'll ever survive, not without her father, who has returned from war with a different soul behind his eyes.

When Lee and Sen find one another through a door between their worlds, they're both looking for answers. But what they find in the creaking old house they share is beyond what either of them could imagine . .