#YISHREADS October 2024

By Ng Yi-Sheng / @yishkabob

October’s always a horror-themed month for this column—and why not? Singapore’s had an age-old love affair with horror media, and I’m pretty proud to call myself a scholar of our creepalicious corpus.[i] Still, I’ve usually gone for a bit of twist: in 2022 I looked at a broad range of literary and genre works that draw on horror tropes;[ii] in 2023 I focussed on nonfiction texts about Asian monsters.[iii]

This year, it’s back to basics. I’m featuring hellish supernatural yarns from Singapore, Japan, Mexico, Canada and Croatia—coincidentally, all in novella and short-story form—dating from the 19th century to this very year. Gothic horror, psychological horror, folk horror: it’s all here, plus a couple of extremely queer takes on the genre!

Fright, Volume 1: Winners of the 2022 Storytel Epigram Horror Prize, eds. Gwee Li Sui, Annaliza Bakri and Jason Erik Lundberg
Epigram, 2022

As the title suggests, this here’s an anthology of the top eleven tales in a Singaporean horror story competition, meant to be the first of a whole series—editor Jason Erik Lundberg said on Facebook that he hoped to eventually reach the pun-worthy Fright10.[iv] Alas, ‘twas not to be: Storytel pulled out of the project after a year, leaving this volume as the sole survivor of its race.

Fortunately, it’s pretty damn good, both in terms of literary quality and genuine creepiness. I’ve written before about how Singaporean horror’s seen a shift from classic folk horror (e.g. hantu and hungry ghosts) to more cosmopolitan horror (globalised boogiepersons, technological and conceptual heebie-jeebies).[v] This collection contains both, with pretty strong representation in each—though it feels like the editors are trying to celebrate more of the folk, whereas authors are leaning more towards the cosmopolitan.

We open and close with very classic ghost stories: Meihan Boey’s “The General’s Wife”, about a ravenous 19th century spirit in a mysterious mansion, and Jane Huang’s “Ah Boy”, about an HDB apartment-dwelling toyol. Dew M. Chaiyanara’s “Under the Banana Tree” and Kimberly Lium’s “Forty Winks Before Dawn” also feature iconic Asian monsters—respectively, the pontianak and a variety of yurei—though they’re a little unoriginal and amateurish, in my opinion.

In between, we’ve got a bunch of tales about nameless dread. O Thiam Chin’s “When We Are Alive and Well” features nurses enduring a pandemic and an unspeakable Thing that haunts the hospital; Tan Lixin’s “Dreams” centres on a man caught in a delusional cycle; Wen-yi Lee’s “That Is Their Tragedy” dwells on the psychological/body horror of the mother/daughter bond; Tan Lixin’s “Hamsters” manages to turn fairly ordinary childhood pet ownership into a harrowing lifelong nightmare.

My two favourites—one more folk, one more cosmopolitan—are as follows. Dave Chua’s “Hantu Hijau” (the second prize winner) tells of a girl’s encounters with a spirit in a grungy HDB on the edge of poverty, really leaning into the struggle of the lower-lower-middle-class everyday with haunting as an expression of the sublime in the midst of squalor. Teo Kai Xiang’s “Untitled Train Story” involves weird eldritch shit happening in MRT tunnels, but overlaid with the paranoia of a post-truth world, as the unknown entities who harvest ordinary citizens literally rewrite our memories, so that the story becomes about the inconsistencies of its own telling. (Speaking as a former reporter in a nation without press freedom, this feels very familiar—and guess what? The author’s a reporter too!)

Still, don’t make too much of my binary. The number one prize-winner, Kelly Leow’s “Breakwater”, is fascinating cos it combines traits of folk and cosmopolitan horror, focusing on a monster in the shape of a seductive man (shades of the orang minyak!) luring his female prey to the shoreline, while the souls of his previous victims watch helplessly—yet his wavering image, online and offline, and his threat of sharing revenge porn, is thoroughly of the digital age.

I think what’s irked me about cosmopolitan Singapore horror in the past is that it’s felt very superficial—just import zombies and serial killers into the country and let shenanigans ensue. The stories I like in this volume are all thoroughly grounded, not just in our culture (more urban than kampung, after all) but in the fragmenting minds of the protagonists.

Extremely bummed that this foray into a new wave of Singaporean horror couldn’t continue. Weird how it was so Chinese-dominated, though—just look at the names of the authors!

Japanese Ghost Stories, by Lafcadio Hearn
Penguin, 2019

It's seriously nuts that it's taken me this long to read Lafcadio Hearn: he’s the original weeaboo, the great Western recorder of Japanese folk and classical horror, so revered that his English tales have been reverse-translated and taught in Japanese schools.

Born in Greece in 1850, raised in Dublin (where he might've brushed shoulders with a young Bram Stoker!) and London, and coming to fame as a reporter and aficionado of Black culture in NYC, Cincinnati and New Orleans (he was briefly married to a biracial woman who was born into slavery), he only went to Japan at the age of 39, but spent the rest of his life there lecturing in English and preserving vanishing culture during the Meiji era, particularly the horrific tales of corpse-eating jikinki and headless rokuro-kubi and faceless mujina that populate this volume.

To clarify, though: not every story here is hair-raising. Some are tales of divine transformation: reflections on the legend of Urashima Taro during a rickshaw ride in "Dream of a Summer Day" (the tale was already known in 19th century Europe); a transcendent anecdote of a tengu time-travelling a monk to hear the Buddha preaching the Perfect Way on the holy Indian mountain Gridhrakuta in "Story of a Tengu"; a retelling of Tang Xianzu's Dream Under the Southern Bough / 《南柯一梦》, in which a young man dreams that he passes an entire lifetime as royalty among ants, in "The Dream of Akinosuké".

There's also first-hand accounts, e.g. "In Cholera-Time", where he meets a kid who's supposedly suckled by his dead mother, and stuff that's just plain weird—a well haunted by the spirit of a mirror in "The Mirror Maiden"; a helpful shark-man who weeps rubies in "The Gratitude of the Samébito"; a man swallowing a soul when a face appears in his drink in "In a Cup of Tea". (This is one of several stories in which Hearn interjects to explain that some stories may appear fragmentary or dissatisfying to Occidental readers, though he never appears condescending, instead affirming the strangeness of these documented marvels.)

As with all story collections, tropes emerge, especially of vicious women, turned to murderous revenants when they die and their husbands remarry... even pre-emptively, e.g. "Ingwa-Banashi", where a dying woman grabs her husband's concubine's boobs, leaving her dead hands fused to them for the rest of her life. (The hands are amputated, but even when the poor girl becomes a nun, they keep squeezing her every night at the Hour of the Ox.) Also unearthly brides: yuki-onna (snow women), ghostly women from the vanished Heiké clan, or, in "The Story of Chugoro", a frog who assumes the form of noblewoman who invites handsome young men to spend nights with her in her palace in the river, which causes them to weaken and die (something bad always happens when they reveal the story), with no blood running in their veins, only water.

It honestly makes me kinda envious—if only Southeast Asia had had a colonial writer as sympathetic, as generous, as talented at writing, who'd preserved and disseminated our lore in stories as beautiful and weird as this. But there was only one Lafcadio Hearn—and few of us read Hugh Clifford and AW Hamilton as it is. If we want our folklore told gorgeously, maybe we've gotta do that ourselves.

The Route of Ice and Salt, by José Luis Zárate
Translated by David Bowles
Innsmouth Free Press, 2021

We’ve got a cult classic here: a 1998 Mexican Dracula fanfic! The novella’s told from the

POV of the captain of the Demeter, the dark ship that transports the Count’s coffin from Romania to London.

What makes this extra edgy is the fact that Zárate's made his captain gay, like himself, but brutally repressed, navigating his position of power over men to select the handsomest, most hairless, whitest sailors of Eastern Europe, but too wary to sleep with them (save a select few), even going to whorehouses to prove his masculinity, while mourning his lover Mikhail, lynched by his own village when his secret was discovered. So when the rats start leaving the ship and he dreams evil dreams of forbidden blood and secret flesh and his sailors start disappearing one by one... it's just an extension of the nightmare he's been living already.

Been thinking about this recent desire among young queer readers for "wholesome" gay content, where same-sex lovers live monogamously ever after. But this darkness is necessary, is true of so many of our stories. Nor is it only true for queerness: Zárate references the military police of his childhood as colouring his writing. Under tyranny, all desire for liberty is queer, and a tale of tunnelling through darkness.

Linghun, by Ai Jiang
Dark Matter INK, 2023

A strange psychological horror novella, where the predominant emotion evoked isn't fear as much as it is awful sorrow. 

Wenqi, a Chinese-Canadian teenage girl, moves with her parents into the community of HOME, where every house has the potential to become haunted with the ghost of the family's bereaved. In her case, that means her dead brother: her mother becomes obsessed with summoning and spoiling his ghost, to the point of abusing Wenqi, destroying her own body, in order to favour him. And as Wenqi learns, the entire community is a gaping wound: a high school where the textbooks are stuck in time, the lingerers who live in tents on people's yards until they get a chance to buy a house, the insane real estate agent who conducts bloodsports auctions. All representations of the monstrousness of grief, which can trap you and the ones alive you still love.

There's something here as well about narratives of migration—Wenqi's family are migrants from Fuzhou, as is the mysterious neighbour only known as Mrs.—the sterility of Canadian suburbia, the microaggressions of white men who fetishise Asian immigrant women. (“Immigration is the death of part of us,” Ai says in an afterword.) But this isn't really about Chineseness, despite the motifs of youtiao and spoken Mandarin: it's Liam, a white-coded character in far more dire circumstances than Wenqi, who observes, "This town worships the dead, but it has no respect for the living," which sounds like it fell from the lips of Lu Xun. Grief is a nation of many races.

Not quite as enamoured by the two extra short stories, "Yongshi" (about an immortal granting favours of extending life) and "Teeter Totter" (better: a witch caught between hell and a hardscrabble street vendor life in a place that feels like Chinatown). They’re thematically resonant, but it's the scale of Linghun that makes it impressive. Not just a private haunting, but a story of haunting made communal and capitalist. Monstrous, like I said.

The Lost Treasure Hunters and Other Tales of Folk Terrors, by Antonija Mežnarić
Shtriga, 2024

Got this from the author herself at Worldcon 2024! It's a horror novella and three short stories, all based on her research into the spooky history of her hometown of Rijeka in Croatia—some written in English, some translated by herself from Croatian, and all of it pretty damn queer.

The novella's proper title is The Mystery of the Lost "Treasure Hunters of Velebit": Overview of the Material: a Blair Witch Project-esque found footage composite of video transcripts, text messages, emails, etc, assembled by the brother of the sole survivor of a horror podcast expedition (a lesbian couple, a straight girl and a gay guy, with names based on Antonija herself and her friends) into the Velebit mountain range. It's a bit of a slow burn, but once we get going, we get a wonderful complex of dread, disgust and downright confusion—the characters doubt their own notes, there are gaps in the footage, and the entangled motifs of the Ninth Roman Well, Ottoman history, werewolves, serpent births, disappearances, don't all add up to the same thing. There's a chaos of concealing and revealing that echoes very real recollections of trauma—and in the midst of the blood, the surprisingly compelling temptation to accept a wolf as your boyfriend.

Fittingly, the three short stories aren't about queer victims but rather queer monsters. "What Lies Tangled in the River Grass" is a rather sweet tale of a female werewolf who settles down with a river spirit, first fighting over, then divvying up their human prey. "To Stop the Screaming" (my personal favourite) has a horribly abused new mother accept the kiss of her witchy neighbour as licence to bloodily make all her patriarchal problems go away.

"Notes and Reports on the Woman in White Incident" is a little more wobbly: it's also kinda found footage, being an incident report by a lesbian teacher who uncovers the cause of the haunting in her girls' school... but the fact that half the staff are supernatural beings (including herself) is a little distracting and unnecessary, diluting the horrific elements with a tinge of the banal. Made sense when I discovered that this is a prequel to Antonija's upcoming urban fantasy novel From the Cradle to the Grave—it's coming out next month with the same publisher.

Genuinely inspiring—i.e. I’m literally tempted to do copycat versions of these tales! Also fascinating how, as a former Eastern bloc nation that’s joined the EU, Croatia's a country that manages to have both civil unions and high levels of traditional religious homophobia. It adds to the weirdness: you never know if you’re safe.

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Endnotes

[i] Ng Yi-Sheng. “A History of Singapore Horror.” BiblioAsia. 3 July 2017. https://biblioasia.nlb.gov.sg/vol-13/issue-2/jul-sep-2017/historyofsghorror/

[ii] Ng Yi-Sheng, “#YISHREADS October 2022.” Suspect. 28 October 2022. https://singaporeunbound.org/suspect-journal/2022/10/28/yishreads-october-2022

[iii] Ng Yi-Sheng, “#YISHREADS October 2023.” Suspect. 27 October 2023. https://singaporeunbound.org/suspect-journal/2023/10/27/yishreads-october-2023

[iv] Jason Erik Lundberg. “Unless you spotted this in the Epigram Books newsletter…” Facebook. 16 June 2023. https://www.facebook.com/jelundberg/posts/pfbid02qQMjxvszmnh76uN13MHNg5Z4qhqPh4Qgdj62bpcJbgP6yXqiznp1jCqN2ETBSDSul

[v] Ng Yi-Sheng. “A History of Singapore Horror.” BiblioAsia. 3 July 2017. https://biblioasia.nlb.gov.sg/vol-13/issue-2/jul-sep-2017/historyofsghorror/

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Ng Yi-Sheng (he/him) is a Singaporean writer, researcher and LGBT+ activist. His books include the short-story collection Lion City and the poetry collection last boy (both winners of the Singapore Literature Prize), the non-fiction work SQ21: Singapore Queers in the 21st Century, the spoken word collection Loud Poems for a Very Obliging Audience, and the performance lecture compilation Black Waters, Pink Sands. He recently edited A Mosque in the Jungle: Classic Ghost Stories by Othman Wok and EXHALE: an Anthology of Queer Singapore Voices. Check out his website at ngyisheng.com.

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