The Curse of Lop Nur

The Curse of Lop Nur is the first ultra-long suspense novel by Zhou Dedong after two years of lying low. Five volumes and over a million characters in total, it is the author's first attempt at an American-TV-style long-form narrative structure, fusing youth, love, exploration, the magical and the horrific into a single story. The work takes as its stage Lop Nur, the wasteland known as the "Sea of Death." In official records and folk legend alike, Lop Nur holds too many unsolved mysteries: the ancient Loulan of a thousand years ago, the former nuclear test site, the disappearances of scientific expeditions and travelers, and Yu Chunshun, the professional traveler who truly walked into Lop Nur and never came out. Using Yu Chunshun's experience as background imagery, the novel narrates in the first person a series of supernatural events that befall "me" and an expedition team after they enter Lop Nur: the team loses its way in the desert, its sense of direction repeatedly scrambled as if something were secretly rewriting their path; night camps, daytime mirages and hallucinations of uncertain origin among team members magnify each person's innermost fears little by little. The story pulls back and forth between the extreme natural environment and the gradually widening cracks in human nature: danger comes not only from the desert itself but from companions' suspicion, concealment and betrayal. As the journey deepens, an ancient curse, disordered time and space, and the lost together form mysteries peeled back layer by layer, while "me," as narrator, can only press forward through fear on limited clues. The author seeks to use the rhythm and language of online reading to achieve the texture of a traditional long novel, turning a forbidden land with no clear answer into a winding, unputdownable expedition of death.