The Xiangxi Corpse Driver: A Record of Strange Cases in Xiangxi

Deep in the mountains of western Hunan, on nights when the corpse-driving bells ring, the living must hold their breath, and the dead open their eyes. Lin Xiaoqi, the last corpse-driving practitioner in western Hunan, has been able to see the ghostly lights along the Yellow Springs Road since childhood. She burned paper money and scattered cinnabar, thinking she would spend the rest of her life running a funeral shop. Then a string of “grinning murder cases” struck the county town: a taxi driver curled up in a mound of grave dirt, scraps of a talisman lodged beneath his nails; a college student lying rigid in her dormitory, bloodstained coins scattered beside her pillow; a nurse’s body vanishing under surveillance, leaving behind only a Bagua diagram drawn in lime. More horrifying still, the missing bodies of every victim “walk” toward the mass burial ground on nights of the full moon. To prove her innocence, Lin Xiaoqi has no choice but to take up her ancestral corpse-driving bell again. An old photograph in the morgue reveals a shocking secret from twenty years ago: her missing grandfather stands among a group wearing Nuo opera masks, with black blood seeping from seven red coffins at his feet. The female corpse inside one of them looks exactly like her mother. When the bronze bell rings again at midnight, she discovers that her birth details have been carved into the soul-suppressing stele at a corpse-nurturing site, while the corpse mark over her heart spreads an inch each night. It is a countdown to the Corpse King’s awakening.

Deep in a karst cave, a blood pool holds eighty bronze coffins, each containing a young woman who is a “shed skin” from one of her past or present lives. A secret room behind the hospital’s morgue cabinets hides a patchwork garment, its bloodstains piecing together the words “the seventh day of the seventh month of the Guiyou year” in a funerary script. When she tears open Officer Wang Jianguo’s collar, the man who should have died in a chemical plant explosion last century has a gray-blue character, “substitute,” crawling out from his collarbone…