What Comes First, the House or the Haunting?

‘Silk & Sinew: A Collection of Folk Horror from the Asian Diaspora,’ a new anthology edited by Kristy Park Kulski, uses storytelling to demonstrate why ‘the ghosts of our futures cannot just be entities that lurk in the background.’

By Jered MabaquiaoFebruary 7, 2026

• Fiction

• Cultural Studies

WHEN MY GRANDPARENTS and their daughters (my mom and three aunts) immigrated from the Philippines to Texas in the early 1980s, I suspect they, like many immigrants, were looking to put down roots, to (re)shape the foundational bedrock for their family. Some of my most poignant memories from early childhood come from the time spent in my grandparents’ house, playing in their garden in the Texas Hill Country. When school was dismissed for summer vacation, I spent the hottest months of the year with them, running around the property, skipping stones in a nearby creek, or gathering bugs in the surrounding woods. I remember watering the rows of vegetables and herbs that seemed to stretch endlessly and wearing rain boots a few sizes too big that would always get stuck in the mud. I can remember spraying the garden hose high into the air to simulate the feeling of rainfall, a much-needed event during scorching Texas summers. In a lot of ways, their garden, my first playground, was the homestead.

But it was also a graveyard. My grandparents were always raising chickens, feeding stray cats, and taking in dogs in order to ward off snakes, rats, and other pests. When these animals died, my grandpa buried their bodies on the edge of the garden, far enough from the rows of vegetables so that their bodies couldn’t rot into the surrounding soil. The gravesites were marked by our handcrafted wooden crosses, sometimes staked into the ground, sometimes loosely hung on chicken-wire fences. This garden was my original pet cemetery—a place to rest and a place that haunts.

With that garden in mind, reading the recent anthology edited by Kristy Park Kulski, Silk & Sinew: A Collection of Folk Horror from the Asian Diaspora (2025), brings me back to the question of rest—where we rest and what haunts the places we call home. In the book, nostalgia—the longing to return home—reveals both the horror and the beauty of desire. Home becomes a fantasy that can only exist in memory. For many of these authors, home is a decaying memorial bed—shifting, infested, and damaged whether we stay or go. It is a diasporic site waiting to be dislodged and (re)discovered. Silk & Sinew breaks new ground not only in the genre of folk horror but also in the global conversation over what it means to be an immigrant and to reckon with tragedy. The Asian diasporas, extending across generations, borders, and psychic and social lives, must contend with the everyday horrors of political violence.

Kulski’s collection is strikingly meaningful in the political context of the second Trump administration, especially its violent enforcement of immigration policy, its clear desire to uproot, displace, and punish marginalized communities. The book’s political resonance, in the face of community rage and frustration, is a call to action. How does one create a resting place among the ever-rupturing American dream? Are we forced to be ghosts on a land that rejects our spirits?

Kulski’s collection is an accumulation of tales from authors of Thai, Chinese, Taiwanese, Laotian, Ryukyuan, Indian, Armenian, Korean, Filipino, and Oceanic descent. Like my grandparent’s garden, Silk & Sinew becomes a space balanced between life and death, between the weight of memory and the air of forgetting. The collection creates space for all connoisseurs of horror with its tales of ghosts, murders, family secrets, cannibalism, environmental desecration, and spiritual forces. Silk & Sinew’s authors contribute to the multitude of voices that explore the horrors of a specifically Asian immigrant life. Working through intergenerational and transnational trauma, the anthology leaves us asking, What happens when we are seeds scattered by the winds, unable to take root?

Kulski’s contributors provide no easily digestible answers. Organized into earthbound categories, the book consists of five sections: “Soil,” “Estuary,” “Bedrock,” “Roots,” and “Air”—elements that represent the symbolic and physical challenges Asian diasporic communities confront. Soil, for example, represents a sort of cultural porosity, space to be filled or occupied. Geneve Flynn’s opening poem, “A Pocket of Soil,” places readers in the dirty textures of identity and (im)possibility:

you bring with you a pocket of soil
your mother’s ghost, and nothing more
you plant your heart, hoping it takes
but the alkaline shale
turns it all to calcified stone

The effects of immigration are often a blend of rejections, frustrations, and enforced liminality. Flynn’s planted heart that fails to grow represents the overwhelming deadening of choices Asian communities often face. If it is not the political hegemony constantly questioning, uprooting, and violating us, then it is the violence we do to ourselves as a coping mechanism. And perhaps the most horrific part of this violence is that we may enjoy it.

The challenge of this book is that it asks us to confront ourselves—our guilts, sacrifices, loneliness, isolation, and ever-growing hunger. The stories confront us with a recurring paradox—we at once sympathize with the difficult choices families make to ensure their survival and recognize that those choices can simultaneously cause destruction. Tracing these causes, the tales oscillate between becoming and undoing, the authors surfacing and unsettling the realities of Asian immigrant life. Full of desperation, rage, uncertainty, and doubt, the authors of Silk & Sinew reckon with the possibility of lost futures.

The vibrant, earthy framework of folk horror expressed in Kulski’s collection reflects the critical importance of Asian diasporic engagements with pasts and futures. The work of memory in the aesthetic of folk horror is a means of connection to national and geographic histories, and to the earth itself. Silk & Sinew provides a kind of breeding ground for new physical sedimentations and psychic cultivations. It explores the tension between independently shaping oneself and staying committed to one’s homeland.

The Asian diasporas in Silk & Sinew are depicted as vessels, hollowed-out shells, or sheaths, used and recycled. The characters in Audrey Zhou’s “Mother’s Mother’s Daughter,” for example, ask us to revisit the consequences of sacrifice and the maintenance of family traditions. How do we understand what our roots are—or, rather, what they can be? Specifically demonstrating how immigrant mothers graft purpose onto their children, Zhou’s story emphasizes the intensity of moving forward with the weight of grief growing into, and onto, us. Pieces of the mother’s body are literally used to sustain the family’s needs, the three sisters all sprouting from the planted limbs of the mother. This bodily severance is a routine for survival. Two of the mother’s ribs, for example, are planted in the earth and grow into the house in which the family lives. Hair, fingernails, and skin grow to meet the family’s needs for furniture, clothes, and food. The main character considers “the worth of flesh and bone,” asking, “How do you measure love once you’ve pulled it out of your body?” It’s this extractive factor of assimilation that produces the paradox of Asian (un)belonging. Female rage and sacrifice are centered here too, as well as throughout the collection, emphasizing the erasure of agency and the misogynist ideology that engulfs so many immigrant women.

Silk & Sinew also explores the connection between body horror and the effects of colonialism. The “Estuary” section asks when and how much we need to sacrifice to belong. Kanishk Tantia’s “Jars of Eels” provides a potential answer to this question. Following a fishmonger, Amna, who deals with the parasitic effects of imperialist mercantilism, the story exposes how capitalist globalization preys on Asiatic communities and reproduces a simmering rage. Tantia demonstrates that it’s in an empire’s best interest to create problems and then offer its own solutions, ultimately reinforcing and benefiting from a community’s dependency. Amna’s own solution resists such a pernicious cycle, offering readers the catharsis of released rage. In its slow transformation and reclamation of agency, “Jar of Eels” conveys a sense of empowerment as well as a recognition that compromise may be necessary for the survival of a community suffering under imperialism.

The stories in Silk & Sinew show that social negotiation, code-switching, multilayered histories, and the transformation into something new do not always mean becoming something better. In “Fed by Earth, Slaked by Salt,” Jess Cho explores how “in every compromise, there is a meeting place, a juncture where two things might stop being themselves and become something together, something different and new.” Consolidation is a form of sacrifice. Cho’s description of the desperation of belonging conveys a horrific feeling of loneliness and the hunger that accompanies it. Their story holds this question: “Is there any power on Earth like the desperation of a mother? Perhaps only the desire to be accepted, to carve out a place for yourself to belong. Combine them both, and they become a powerful force, with no end to what they might accomplish.”

Silk & Sinew is a testament to what this hunger and desire can lead to—a force of storytelling, a gathering of community, and a garden of histories that is ultimately a place of rest. For Asian diasporas, the ghosts of our futures cannot just be entities that lurk in the background. These ghosts—the horrors of our forced choices and inescapable regrets—can be generative for the future. When we put into words our feelings of abandonment, frustration, and rage, we come to perceive the boundaries and frameworks of our lives. Silk & Sinew reminds us that the ghosts of our past aren’t just here to terrify us; they’re also here to teach us how to grow roots, even in barren soil.