Excerpt from Hungry Ghosts by Kevin Jared Hosein, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

He told her that he'd inherited the land from his father. And his father from his. He imported crates of furniture, artwork, ornaments and tapestries from India and England. The arable land and crops yielded profits – Marlee was certain. But the kind of money that Dalton brought in seemed flecked with blood. He was involved in criminality; it was the only explanation. His secrets insidious, his soul scripted to perdition. The principles of the underworld shift all the time. That is its nature. Every faction sets up its own morals. Every god breaks its own rules. A spinning wheel, where everything comes back to the beginning, sooner or later. If he was willing to be a spoke in that wheel, Dalton had to know that he was going to have to pay for his sins one day.

She let the record play again, made Ceylon tea and listened to the storm. There was something scary and fantastic and exciting as the lightning seemed to creep through the window. As if God was reaching out to her. As if to answer some lost prayer.

* * *

The morning after the note, Marlee went downstairs to prepare breakfast. Dalton wasn't there – usually, he would be at the kitchen table with his bifocals, skimming the newspaper. He brewed his own coffee and drank until his nerves were shot. Preferred imported arabica to the locally grown robusta. Marlee maintained the house, did the washing, the folding, the sweeping, the dusting, the chopping, the cooking, the baking. Did it for her own sake, at least. There were never any guests, soirees, coffee klatches, birthday parties. The living room, kitchen, bedrooms, the wainscotted staircase only held memories of them both. Because of this, the house always felt like some concealed shrine.

The wordless stillness of the house now made the gloom of the air more apparent. Its silence holy and eerie. For most of the day, she was a ghost roaming a haunted manor. If he wasn't in the kitchen, perhaps he was in the outhouse – a single-roomed shed that he had fashioned into some sort of strange sanctum.

A nymphaeum that held nothing but a giant oil painting of a Chinese goddess.

He made it clear – she was never to enter unless he was there too. As if she were too profane for it. The goddess, like the dogs, had been there before her. The goddess, draped in lavender and topped with a phoenix crown, was surrounded by four jade maidens and giant messenger bluebirds.

Marlee very slowly turned the knob, tipping the door open. Dust wafted like snowfall within the dim, tomblike room. Dalton was not there. The goddess and her maidens glared at her sternly as if she had interrupted some invocation. It was only recently that Dalton had shared the goddess's name with Marlee.

Xi Wang Mu, Queen Mother of the West.

One day, he admitted that his mother's soul had been absorbed by the painting and spoke to him through the canvas. She also learnt that the apparition had once been impressed with her and even suggested his marriage to her. But no more. His mother now saw Marlee as a liar and a charlatan. That woman simply isn't devoted, Dalton. He confessed that there was little he could do to change his mother's mind. All of this he had divulged unprovoked.

Marlee married Dalton, knowing he was unsound of mind – but his condition had significantly worsened over the past five years. Paranoia, dementia, monomania – she wasn't sure how to describe it. He had rooms with towers of newspapers and magazines and boxes and all sorts of ephemera. Flew into rages at the slightest mention of tidying those rooms. The house itself was a hodgepodge of things foreign and colonial and postcolonial and antebellum and pretty and gold and red and scintillating. It was ungainly and disgusting, just like him.

The note about the spare key was still on the table.

It was only then Marlee remembered Brahma.

Still in her cotton nightgown, she slipped on her outdoor shoes. The tarp now hung flaccidly in a yellow grin from the coconut boughs. The land was wet but up on the hill, flooding was never a problem. Downhill, where the cherry orchard was located, a rivulet fed a pond a short distance away. The rivulet had gotten hungry over the years and each time it rained, it engorged. Ate the land around it. It was bad for the cherries, and so Dalton grew them only for personal enjoyment.

Excerpted from Hungry Ghosts by Kevin Jared Hosein. Copyright © 2023 by Kevin Jared Hosein. Excerpted by permission of Ecco. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.