Rob is a member of the NCWW, a writer’s workshop here in Denver, and I was fortunate enough to read an early draft of his new novel HUNDRED GHOST SOUP a couple years ago.
I loved it! Even in it’s half-formed state, this novel had a depth, a richness, to it that I don’t often see. It’s thoughtful, fraught with ghosts and Chinese mythos, and deeply personal.
I posted the following review to Amazon, and gave it five stars:
“A rich, bountiful adventure!
By Lou J Berger on November 2, 2016
Format: Kindle Edition
Opening Rob Chansky’s book HUNDRED GHOST SOUP is like stepping up to a sumptuous buffet of foods you’ve never had before. Sure, the ingredients are common, but master chef Chansky wields his impressive wordsmithing skills and fashions scenes, dialogue, and characters into a fulfilling feast of ideas, concepts, and description.
His main character, an orphan with no prospects, leaps at the chance to be adopted, in the month before his eighteenth birthday, to strangers he’s never met, who are to be found in the middle of nowhere, at a location where the trains never stop.
He’s an unreliable narrator, deeply ensconced in Chinese mysticism, and believes in the ghosts he sees around him constantly, even though he’s not quite sure he isn’t crazy for doing so. The foods he eats are illusory and, though he eats a surfeit of delicious morsels each night, he awakens each morning with the realization that he had, in fact, consumed nothing at all.
Chansky weaves a classically Chinese fairy tale into whole cloth, employing dozens of ingredients culled from classic Chinese mythology, skillfully doing so as we, the readers, are dragged along from one dangerous situation to the next.
Not a book to be dismissed as fluff, HUNDRED GHOST SOUP is a rich, bountiful adventure worthy of the highest regard.”
If you’d like to read it yourself, here’s the link:
https://amzn.com/B01HYK2MHC