Fierce Teeth

Fierce Teeth is a full-length horror novel by suspense writer Na Chengjun, published by New World Press in February 2013. The story begins with a detail from a forensic examination: at the murder scene, the forensic examiner finds a rare and eerie tooth mark on the throat of the victim Lin Si; the same tooth mark also appears on the throats of three other victims—though those three died four years earlier. Interwoven with this are a series of strange occurrences in Niugang Village, a community made wealthy by livestock farming: goats committing mass suicide, attacks on people, and then Fang Da slicing open his own belly with a knife and dying in the restaurant he ran. These seemingly unrelated deaths and strange phenomena are linked by the same tooth mark, drawing out an abandoned brick kiln, buried past events, and hidden secrets. The novel is known for its layer-by-layer suspense, cold and eerie atmosphere, and constantly reversing clues; from the face in the ancient painting, the dead man's diary, bizarre suicides, and the dried corpse of an ancient beast, the mysteries unfold one after another, combining the rational deduction of suspense fiction with the psychological pressure of horror. While asking who the killer is, it also asks about the darker parts of human nature: when the victim becomes the killer, when ulterior motives lie beneath a benevolent surface, the truth is often more chilling than any ghost story.