The Devoted Dead

She died watching a ghost story. He died driving home from a writing group. Neither of them expected to wake up in one.

When Kalliyan Mao and Davith Saravong - two Cambodian- and Lao-American strangers from Providence, Rhode Island - open their eyes after fatal car accidents, they find themselves impossibly displaced: inhabiting the bodies of the two most famous figures in Thai folklore, in 1860s Siam, with a legend already in motion around them. Kalliyan knows this story by heart. Davith has seen the movie. They both know exactly how it ends - and neither of them is willing to let it.

The Devoted Dead is a genre-blending romantic fantasy about two people who must navigate a haunting from the inside, outwit a legend that wants its ending, and reckon with the gap between the stories cultures tell about women and the truth those stories bury. Funny, tender, and genuinely scary in equal measure, it asks what happens when the monster in the story turns out to be the most human person in it - and whether two strangers, bound by the worst date they ever had, might just be brave enough to change everything.