REVIEW: My Husband and I Sleep in a Coffin, Vol. 2 (book) by Wu Shui Bu Du, illustrated by Oniku and Chikage, translated by Liting Xiao

My Husband and I Sleep in a Coffin is fantasy danmei (Chinese m/m) fiction. I bought my copy of this volume new.

Review:

Wang Xiaomie and Wen Fengjin have moved out of the mausoleum and begun living in modern China, mostly because Xiaomie misses the internet and eating whatever his heart desires. Their domestic bliss is interrupted by the arrival of Bai Yu, a young man Wen Fengjin finds bloody and injured on the street and takes home because that's what Xiaomie told him that good people should do.

Bai Yu turns out to have been the same person who'd previously been stalking Wang Xiaomie and Wen Fengjin. He's an orphan, the last surviving member of a line of Artisans, people who hunt nonhuman monsters and create tools to kill them. After Wang Xiaomie was nice to him, he decided that the pair he was stalking maybe weren't so bad after all, but unlucky Bai Yu seems to have attracted his own trouble. Xiaomie likes the naive young man and, surprisingly, Wen Fengjin seems relatively okay with having him stick around for a bit while they look into whatever trouble he's gotten himself into.

I wasn't wild about volume 1 and probably wouldn't have continued on, except I have this fear of discovering that I like a series only to find that volumes I haven't purchased have gone out of print, so I already owned a copy of the next volume. It really would have been best to stop after volume 1, though.

Not only do we still have a primary couple that is not nearly as sweet and romantic as the author seems to want readers to think they are (maybe? the author does take the time to remind readers that Wen Fengjin absolutely would have killed Wang Xiaomie if he'd remembered Fengjin and then rejected him), we have the introduction of an even more horrifying secondary couple (that is somewhat redeemed in bonus stories), as well as frequent colorism where Bai Yu was concerned.

This is how Bai Yu is described the first time Wang Xiaomie gets a good look at him: "Wang Xiaomie had always thought he just hadn't been able to get a good look at the guy. But now, he realized it wasn't because he couldn't see properly at the time - it was that this bro really was way too dark-skinned. And by dark-skinned, he meant genuinely black. Not black like a foreigner, but the kind of black you got when naturally dark skin was baked under the sun for at least half a month." (15-16)

A page later, we learn that Bai Yu's name apparently means "white jade," which readers were supposed to find funny combined with his dark complexion. Nearly every single time Bai Yu was mentioned in the rest of the book (which was fairly often), there was some comment about how dark-skinned he was. So dark-skinned that he was practically invisible (literally - he even scared Wen Fengjin at one point). So dark-skinned that Wang Xiaomie couldn't see his features well enough to tell whether he was handsome or not. So dark-skinned that Xiaomie repeatedly offered to help pay for skin whitening treatments.

Yeah, so that sucked. Then we got introduced to An Xie, a hanba (a different type of Chinese vampire? something about being able to cause droughts, not that this came up in the story at all) who, like Wen Fengjin, closed himself up on a mausoleum with his beloved, an emperor who betrayed him. Unlike Wen Fengjin and Wang Xiaomie, however, there were no tender feelings between An Xie and his beloved - he seemed to keep An Chengjing around mostly so that he could torment him, which wasn't hard considering that An Chengjing's form was legless, incapable of speech, hideously corpse-like, and covered in purple fur.

Add to all of this my general lack of interest in whatever was going on with Bai Yu and then Yi Yan, yet another new character, and this volume worked even less well for me than the first one. A few tweaks and a completely different tone, and it could have been an okay horror story, though.

All in all, I don't recommend this series but, if you're going to try it, don't bother to read past the first volume.

Extras:

A couple full-color illustrations, black-and-white illustrations throughout, a character guide and glossary and, since this is the last volume, a few bonus stories. We get the full story of An Xie and his beloved, which isn't quite what's originally presented in the main story (still toxic, but better than Wang Xiaomie and Wen Fengjin's "romance"), and a glimpse of Wang Xiaomie and Wen Fengjin in their "happily ever after" with an adorable adopted daughter (a story that works in a joke about domestic violence, because sure, why not).