"We love the collaborative nature of the book and the way the writers play so creatively with the theme. It’s exciting to have this opportunity to read these different writers working together in this clever way and I know readers will feel the same sense of adventure about this." -- Elizabeth Foley, editor at Harvill Secker

Chopsticks: simple, ingenious, essential. A central and utterly unremarkable feature of life in East Asia. A symbol so powerful it is almost invisible – that is, until five authors invoke it as a central theme for five stories of horror and suspense.

Japanese author Mitsuda Shinzou opens the book with a kaidan about a young schoolboy who is seen at lunchtime performing a wish ritual before a pair of chopsticks stuck into his rice, which promises to bring a response from the spirits world. Taiwanese author Xerses echoes the schoolyard setting in her chapter, in which a boy who wears a pair of coral chopsticks around his neck finds himself the center of female attention. Under the female protagonist’s searching eye, his relationship to his chopsticks – and the divine power they store – does not stay secret for long.

Hong Kong writer JeTauZi turns things even darker in her tale of a famous YouTuber who is poisoned while livestreaming, and his girlfriend’s quest to uncover his killer. But all three stories come to a surprising climax in Xiao Xiang Shen’s fourth chapter, which weaves them together in a single tale of dark intrigue that ends with a bitter twist. Finally, award-winning author Chan Ho-Kei brings everything back to his native Hong Kong, rewriting history and transforming the backstory into a brilliant mix of science fiction, Chinese mythology, and Lovecraftian horror.