The Legend of Lu Chen, Ghostbusting Master

Ghost Exorcist is a novel about ghost hunting that blends Eastern supernatural lore with urban legends. The story follows Lu Chen, the last ghost hunter in Chentang City. On the surface, he runs a shabby fortune-telling shop. In reality, he is the thirty-eighth-generation heir of the Lu family, wielding the power of his bloodline to slay demons and exorcise evil. From corpses rising at a funeral home and rifts into the Hungry Ghost Realm to the underground “Ruin,” Lu Chen discovers that the entire city is built atop an ancient and terrifying seal. He gathers an eclectic group of people with extraordinary skills, including corpse drivers from western Hunan, a Miao witch, and a Maoshan disciple, to face a conspiracy that has been brewing for a thousand years. The novel unfolds in episodic arcs, combining traditional folk-horror tales such as a red-vested secret identity that brings death and ghosts haunting an opera house with an underlying mystery about keys and locks, shadows and their originals, existence and nothingness. Ghost hunting is merely the surface. The real enemy is the void humanity itself has given rise to. When one hundred thousand fragments of the Fiend-Slaying Sword fall into the hands of ordinary people, every citizen becomes a ghost hunter charged with protecting the city. The story moves from eerie and unsettling to warm and hopeful, conveying the message that “life is worth living.”