Ghosts and unnatural deaths predominate Maniniwei’s first novel. The genre is part folk horror and part slice-of-life. The author does not sanitize portrayals of abject poverty, mental illness, nor the callousness of the world order under colonialism and empire. The reader is asked to hear the oral histories of the narrator’s aunt and her people that have survived countless retellings and to hear this retelling, even if the people and land in the stories have long become ghosts. There are shifts in the narration that sound part poem and part ominous possession. These deviations in form reflect the subjects of this book: the vagrants, the undesirables, the poors, and the mentally ill. They are living incomplete, marginal lives. Their brief lives and non-resolutions find space for levity and humor. Their incompleteness compels their haunting.