As a Hawaiian born and raised in Hawaii and trying my hardest to raise my family here, That Which Feeds Us was a deeply personal reading experience.

What initially drew me in was the Hawaiian setting, language, and cultural references woven throughout the story. From the inclusion of ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, iwi kūpuna, and Hawaiian history to discussions of identity, belonging, and cultural loss, this felt like a story grounded in place rather than one that simply used Hawaiʻi as a backdrop.

One of the strongest aspects of the novel is how it explores the tension between Hawaiʻi as home and Hawaiʻi as commodity. The story repeatedly asks who gets to tell a place’s story, who benefits from controlling that narrative, and what is lost when culture is reduced to something consumable. The conversations around colonization, land ownership, erasure, and reconnecting with one’s heritage resonated with me deeply.

Lehua’s journey especially struck a chord. Her shame at not knowing enough, coupled with her desire to learn, felt incredibly familiar. I appreciated that the book acknowledged how complicated cultural identity can be for people who have become disconnected from their roots while also affirming that curiosity, learning, and reconnection matter.

At the same time, this is very much a gothic horror element to the novel. What begins as a slow sense of unease gradually transforms into something far darker. The isolated island setting, unsettling power dynamics, lingering ghosts of the past, and growing sense that the land itself remembers create an atmosphere that becomes increasingly claustrophobic and unnerving.

I should also note that I’m fairly new to gothic horror as a genre, so I’m still learning what works best for me within it. Compared to some of the other gothic horror novels I’ve read, this one didn’t maintain the same level of foreboding and dread that I was expecting throughout much of the story, with that feeling becoming much more pronounced toward the end.

That said, I wonder how much of that came down to my own reading experience. I was so invested in the cultural aspects of the novel, the Hawaiian history, language, identity, and conversations around colonization and belonging—that those elements often took center stage for me. Rather than reading primarily as a horror novel, I found myself engaging with it as a story about place, memory, and cultural survival that happened to be wrapped in gothic horror.

What ultimately stayed with me was the novel’s commitment to the idea expressed in the ʻōlelo noʻeau: He Aliʻi Ka ʻĀina; He Kauwā ke Kanaka: The land is chief; man is its servant. The story stands in direct opposition to the mindset that land can be owned, exploited, and stripped of its history without consequence.

This is a novel about grief, memory, identity, and the stories people tell to justify what they have taken. It is also a reminder that history is not finished, that culture survives, and that remembering can be an act of resistance.

Mai poina. Don’t forget.