A magician and part-time cold-case investigator joins up with a spirit medium to investigate the origins of a creepy nursery rhyme and ghastly legend told by the residents of a picturesque coastal village. What they find is more appalling and dangerous than either could have imagined.

The sleepy north coast village of Old Plum, famed for its windswept, wave-worn sandstone topography, is internet author Flo’s inspirational muse behind this wide-ranging four-volume fantasy horror story in The Bloody Old Plum. The book opens with a tale of a deceptively innocent nursery rhyme with a sinister backstory.

Wu Chang, a magician by trade, has a passion for investigating unsolved murder mysteries in his off-hours. After discovering a deeper, curiously dark meaning in the lyrics of an obscure lullaby, Wu teams up with local tour guide and medium Wang I-Chieh to visit Old Plum Village, the source of the children’s song. There, however, they quickly find the veil of mystery to be thicker even than the fog that regularly blankets the village. Threatened by mysterious shadows stalking them in the fog, they beat a hasty, albeit temporary, retreat.

Far from discouraged, their odd encounters in Old Plum only pique Wu’s curiosity further. He invests in state-of-the-art special equipment and brushes up on local historical knowledge to prepare for a second visit. Comparing his findings with clues woven into the nursery rhyme, Wu learns that the long-abandoned mansion standing where the fog was always thickest is the former home of the local Chen clan – and the site of their brutal massacre.

While preparing their return to Old Plum, a local policeman implores them to end their investigation, saying a survivor had told that on the night the fog appeared, all it touched had perished. Moreover, he tells them the unnatural fog that blankets the property even by day is an otherworldly warning to the curious…and that those foolish enough to enter the decrepit mansion are never seen again.

Flo injects distinctively Eastern fantasy elements into a horror story rooted in the pain of unrequited injustice. The staccato tempo of the narrative and the story’s sudden twists and turns underpin this work’s novel treatment of Taiwan’s infamous White Terror Era.