* The film adaptation of the same name was released in 2024

Three generations of terror are linked by a forbidden ritual and the shocking events in a soldier's diary. When the dead are called back to life, a horrific price must be paid in this stylish horror novel that echoes with cultish chants and the gnawing of flesh and bone.

"A horrific price must be paid by those who force the dead to return."

In the aftermath of the Chinese Civil War, a few battalions of Republic of China soldiers escaped into Burma where they continued to conduct cross-border raids on communist forces before they were finally evacuated to Taiwan. In Gala, the diary of one of these soldiers is passed through three generations, cursing its author and all those who come to possess it.

The novel opens in the borderlands of Burma, where four lost ROC soldiers struggle to survive after being left for dead by their units. On the brink of starvation, they harbor fantasies of cannibalizing one another to stay alive. A strange boy whose face is always covered guides them to a village. As soon as they arrive, the villagers strike up a wild ritualistic chant, and the soldiers begin slaughtering one another before realizing that, in this ritual, all of them will become the sacrifice. These bizarre events are recorded in a soldier's diary which is carried back to Taiwan by a political warfare officer, where another bone-chilling saga begins to unfold.

Decades after the incidents in Burma, a Daoist priest conducts a ritual to drive away evil spirits that have been haunting a construction site of vacation homes in Taiwan. Midway through the ceremony the priest is suddenly assaulted by memories of his mentor, who, while serving as a soldier in Burma, had been asked to conduct a ritual to pacify the spirits of the four lost soldiers. This interference from the past transforms the ritual into something else entirely. Instead of driving spirits away, they are called back to life, a process which demands human sacrifices. As the malevolent spirits exact their toll, not a single worker at the construction site will be spared.

In the present day, a group of vloggers is invited to film at a resort built on the site of the unfinished vacation homes. Their videos go viral after supernatural events are caught on camera, motivating the vloggers to delve deeper into the dark mysteries of the resort, and thereby exposing themselves to a blood-debt that is yet to be fully paid.

With its dark cults, forbidden rituals, and acts of self-cannibalism, Gala is suffused with a Lovecraftian atmosphere of dread that will test the nerves of even the most cool-headed readers. Author Chiang Tai-Yu relates events in ghastly detail, but resists giving a full explanation of the terrifying hauntings, instead focusing on the human tendency to subjugate ourselves to desire, thereby laying the seeds of our own destruction. In the end, readers can only guess whether the terror will ever truly finish.