The Hell Screens

At one point in this uncanny novel, the narrator, Ch ng-ming, describes his literal absorption into a Buddhist temple mural: ""Particles of dispersed light seeped into my pores so that I became indistinguishable from them. The more I looked, the more I found myself enclosed in the mural's world."" Enclosure in an unreal world is the threat that hangs over all of modern-day Taipei, at least as Ch ng-ming lives it. Lu's debut novel is divided between two notebooks, the first recording 19 days during which Ch ng-ming, a Chinese-American, investigates a master criminal named K. who is on the loose in the city; the other, much shorter, is by K. himself. The quest for K. leads Ch ng-ming to interview Sylvia, a school girl who claims to have been K.'s lover. Sylvia, a fortune teller, says she and K. committed double suicide, except that the pills didn't kill her. Fatty, a ghost-obsessed filmmaker, is making a documentary about Wang, an exorcist who is supposedly driving the spirits from the apartment building in which Ch ng-ming lives. Ch ng-ming learns from Fatty that Sylvia is herself a vampiric ghost. After K. is discovered using a vacant apartment in Ch ng-ming's building, the narrative veers into a rapid dematerialization of reality. Fatty is murdered, and the police use Wang to make a sort of extrasensory investigation, implicating Sylvia. Although sometimes stylistically overburdened, the novel is a hypnotic venture into the uncertain reality of liminal existences. Sophisticated readers on the lookout for fresh literary talent will relish Lu's ambitious debut. (Nov. 16)