The Ghost Cook

The Ghost Cook is a long urban novel by sports commentator and screenwriter Duo Ling, published by Lijiang Publishing House in December 2015 with a foreword by Wang Han. The story takes place in a bustling city: Tong Ming and Li Xiaoqin, a couple far from home, ultimately separate under the pressure of survival, their parents' opposition, and a kitchen where strange things happen. Li Xiaoqin falls step by step into a trap of profit and desire and disappears; Tong Ming begins living alone, steadying himself through work and the daily routines of cooking. He goes to the market alone and remembers buying crabs with Xiaoqin and boiling them in their little kitchen. His love of food and cooking leads him, at what seems a fated moment, to meet the man called the "divine cook," Bao Erding. Bao Erding's skills are astonishing; after a lavish feast, the mysteries in the two men's fates slowly come to light. The author says he hid the ghost in the kitchen rather than the bathroom or behind the curtains to use cooking to write about the splits in emotion, between countryside and city, past and future, ambition and reality. The book runs under 200,000 characters and consists of a foreword, "The Kitchen Witch and Kitchen Zen," and eight chapters, with poetic language and tight pacing, mixing a faint eerie chill into the smoke and bustle of city life.