So this was QUITE the ride! Not a lot of horror novels make me go “Nope! Not reading this after dark!” within the first few pages, but when a book does that, I KNOW it’s going to be fun, and this DEFINITELY was.

If one has ever experienced the feeling of going down a Wikipedia or just general internet rabbit hole trying to track down information on some specific thing one saw on a message board or on Reddit and staying up all night to do it, then reading this book will feel VERY familiar. The story being told in fragments of interconnected articles, message board posts, and interview transcripts, interspersed with some narrative from the “author”, entices the reader forward, creating narrative propulsion even with the lack of a “traditional” plot. The inclusion of “actual source material” like drawings, photographs, and screenshots from online livestreams was a very nifty touch, and helped up the creepiness of the story.

There’s also a clear absence of a protagonist in this story, which some readers have claimed detracts from the cohesion of the overall narrative. While it’s true that the book’s fragmented structure can be a bit hard to come to grips with without an obvious central figure around which to organize the story, in my opinion this just places the reader themself as the central figure. From the outset the book is framed as a request for help, and the book is presented as a collection of evidence the reader must put together to find answers. When viewed from that perspective, the reader is not just a distant observer, they are made into a direct participant in the story itself - a realization that is crucial to the novel’s ending.

Speaking of the ending, I found that it wasn’t entirely satisfactory. There was a certain lack of impact in the way this novel wrapped up, despite everything else about it being very well-executed. It made me think of the ending to Bob Ong’s Ang Mga Kaibigan ni Mama Susan, which is in a somewhat-similar genre as About a Place in the Kinki Region (”found” material relating to a creepy event or events), but the ending of Ong’s book felt more impactful than the ending for this novel.

Overall, this was a really spooky read, especially for readers who enjoy found-footage horror films, and/or like to solve mysteries on their own. The blend of online and offline urban legends, as well as folk horror, make for a powerful and terrifying backbone around which the entire story is built, accompanied by a narrative that, though fragmented, encourages the reader to keep reading more and more by putting them in the driver’s seat of solving this mystery once and for all. Though the ending is not as strong as I wish it was, it fortunately doesn’t detract from the overall experience of reading this book.