Your worst housing nightmare is Seattle author Kim Fu's inspiration

May 06, 2026 / 8:02 am

caption: Meet Me Here co-host Katie Campbell recently interviewed Seattle author Kim Fu about their latest novel, "The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts."

So much of the “American dream” hinges on homeownership, but buying a home isn’t always a guarantee of stability or fulfillment.

Seattle author Kim Fu's latest novel reflects on the precarious nature of betting everything on another person’s idea of what a good life looks like.

In "The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts," Fu's unfortunate main character, Eleanor, inherits enough money for a down payment on a house when her mother dies. Eleanor is shocked to discover she can now purchase a big, stylish dream home that is flooded with natural light from the floor-to-ceiling windows. As other prospective buyers approach, she moves fast to put in her offer. Desperate and egged on by her realtor, she does so without an inspection or any of the other contingencies that would have, ideally, noticed those beautiful windows will leak when it rains.

What follows is a true nightmare built on the crummy foundation of Eleanor's new home and of her own adulthood.

Fu's novel was inspired, in part, by real-life catastrophe that struck their home.

"The townhouse unit I was living in had recurrent flooding. There was one season where water came in through the doors and windows. The piping on the second floor poured into the floor, quietly, until it took out the ceiling below," Fu said. "Then, I started having this nightmare where the water heater exploded, and then, again, in the same winter, it did. Like, exactly the way it had in my dreams. In fact, it did for five out of the six units in my complex. The sixth guy heard from the rest of us and replaced it fast enough."

Fu had been working for years on another novel, but suddenly, they were being haunted.

"I had this new kind of more compelling vision," they said, "and I was having this recurring nightmare of a house made of sugar melting in the rain."

Eleanor's house in "The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts" has that vibe — a sugary idea of what a home should be, left to rot in never-ending rain. It's actually a model home that was built as part of an aspiring development that was never finished. Before Eleanor buys the house, she's assured someone else is coming to complete the development around it.

The book begins with a vision of the neighborhood that never was and never will be. Eleanor plays den mother, welcoming the families that follow her, greeting them with a signature pie she doesn't yet know how to make. It's a lovely vision of community and fulfillment and uncomplicated prosperity.

From her roof, Eleanor pictures the community that will never be. In her mind, the promised crews arrive with the rewilding of late spring, when the rivers are flush with ordinary snow melt, their banks holding strong, and the hearts of invasive daisies beam as yellow as the backhoe. A year of frenzied construction follows, the once silent valley filled with movement and noise, hammers, screaming electric saws, barked anxious orders as the windows are lifted into place by crane, until, at last, the houses are finished. She imagines each home filled, one by one, with a family. Eleanor, as the first resident, becomes a kind of leader, den mother, witch. She appears on the doorstep of the second people to move in, bearing a pie. She will learn to make pie, and then only days later, they go together to the house of the next family to arrive. Three households then greet the fourth, descending upon them as they unload furniture from a rented truck, bearing gifts like the three wise men: a casserole, a potted succulent, and Eleanor's now signature pie. And so on, like children playing sardines, the welcome party grows until an entire neighborhood stands waiting, throngs lining the streets as the final family drives down from the mountain road. THE VALLEY OF VENGEFUL GHOSTS

"The prologue of the book is a fantasy of community," Fu said. "I wanted that desire to hang over the whole book. It underscores a lot of Eleanor's actions that are kind of inscrutable otherwise. She just is really longing for family and community, and there's a lot of things she does alone that we all are doing alone that you shouldn't be doing alone."

Things like elder care and grieving as well as home buying. Had Eleanor had someone to confide in, she may not have bought that terrible house. At the very least, she might've had it inspected first.

But because she doesn't, her situation gets progressively worse, all while she's haunted by the ghost of her mother and other spirits, real or imagined, though Fu said the difference is beside the point. The most powerful and anxiety-driving quasi-spirit is money itself, haunting Eleanor's needs and motivations.

"She has made this enormous and terrible investment in this house, and there are these huge numbers being tossed around all the time in regard to buying the house and in repairing the house. Like, even just sort of keeping the house static, keeping it from falling apart further as opposed to actually, like, improving it," Fu said. "And these numbers become abstract and meaningless to her."

Again, Fu's own anxieties inspired this tension built on Eleanor's finances and money's bizarrely abstract nature.

The check felt unnervingly flimsy. [Eleanor] wanted to give Matt a bar of gold bullion, something with heft. Or better, the weight of a corpse. ... Handing the check to Matt felt like watching her mother die, which felt like rehearsing for her first day of preschool. "My name is Eleanor Fan. My mother is Lele Fan. I live at 3588 king Street, unit 201. It was expected and is not an emergency." THE VALLEY OF VENGEFUL GHOSTS

"When I knew that I was definitely writing something with horror elements, I was keeping a list of things that I found scary or made me feel really tense when I was reading other things or consuming other media," they said. "One of the things on my list was money. Whenever in a book someone gets a big sum of money, especially in cash, especially, like, in an envelope or something, I feel so tense. I think, like, 'That's gonna disappear. That's gonna disappear in a terrible way.' And, the more they need the money, the worse it feels."

Why did Fu write a novel that dissected these fears and anxieties? Not only to tell a darn good story, which it is and which I cannot recommend enough to anyone with real estate anxiety, but also to give back to those pesky ghosts who haunted their home and their dreams, the ghosts who set them on this path.

"To be a writer or to be an artist of any kind, you get to turn your nightmares and fears and anxieties into art," Fu said. "They get to be like a little gift to yourself and a little gift to the world."

Fu's books and short stories explore all sorts of anxieties, and we talked about a few more on KUOW's "Meet Me Here." You can listen by hitting play above or by subscribing to the show wherever you get your podcasts.

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Katie Campbell
Online Editor/Reporter

Katie joined KUOW's online team as an editor and reporter in 2024, after serving three years as senior producer of the local Morning Edition program. She has covered a variety of local topics, including the Seattle City Council, elections, and breaking news. She also brings readers some levity with a weekly news quiz.
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