At three in the morning, when the mountain wind slips through the bamboo windows of a stilt house, it always carries a few indistinct words in the Sichuan-Guizhou dialect. The elders call them "the language of the dead."
This story collection parts the thousand-year-old mists hanging over the mountains of southwest China and tells you, in the dim yellow glow of midnight oil lamps, of the Miao village witch's vat of venomous magic, the soul-steadying horn of the Sichuan River boatmen, and the blood-smeared masks of Guizhou's Nuo opera.
