“Set off after suppertime,” the old lady ordered. At the moment they were about to leave, she added: “Kill Old Eyes.”

In this boundary-breaking collection of short stories, Yang Zhengguang, the dark horse of contemporary Chinese literature, unflinchingly dissects the passions and sexual mores of the past. By his own admission, he aims to “unsettle” the reader with black humour and filmic vividness, enticing them into a world where vendettas, humiliation, grave-robbing and murder are an integral part of everyday life in a rural Chinese province untethered from reality.

These stories, available in English for the first time, include the inspiration for the 2001 film How Harry Became a Tree, for which Serbian director Goran Paskaljevic relocated the action to 1920s Ireland; and for which Colm Meaney, starring alongside Cillian Murphy, won an Irish Film & Television Award for Best Actor. Now, this intriguing volume is set to introduce Yang Zhengguang’s unique view of 20th-century China to a whole new global audience.

This book is part of Shaanxi Stories, a series of translated works by acclaimed authors from the Shaanxi province of China, produced by Valley Press in collaboration with Northwest University, Xi’an. The series editors are Hu Zongfeng and Robin Gilbank.

After locusts destroy their crops, a group of desperate farmers swap their seeds and hoes for guns and knives as they swarm into the idyllic village of Ancestral Worshippers Shrine in search of food, drink and female company.

The kind villagers are welcoming but when it comes to bidding their visitors a fond farewell, there’s a problem: the bandits won’t leave. They draw lots to see which of them will be the new Village Head, but when they start drawing lots for new wives, the villagers start to rebel.

In this earthy novel of rivalry and revenge in rural China, Yang Zhengguang gives us an unforgettable crop of characters in a landscape blighted by greedy locusts and unscrupulous men hungry for power.