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SEA Quest: Southeast Asian Horror Fiction

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Southeast Asia is a hot-bed of horror. The region is saturated with dark histories and even darker mythologies. From the krasue from Thailand to hantu tetek from Malaysia and Singapore, legends and stories are rife with things that not only go bump in the night, but are more blood-thirsty than your average Northern Hemisphere ghosts. Centuries of years of trade, migration and settlement brought in more scary spirits and monsters. The Southern Chinese diaspora celebrate Hungry Ghosts Festival for an entire month. Don’t go out at night. Don’t swim in the sea. Don’t kick offerings on the floor. People often breathe a sigh of relief once the month is over. Similarly, the bloodshed and trauma of many wars have left the imprint of haunted memories and hauntings by restless spirits displaced by massacre, starvation and pain. Southeast Asians love horror. Horror movies are extremely popular. Horror and ghost stories are consumed avidly by fans of this genre. In Singapore, a series of ghost stories is still on-going, fueled by the popularity of ghost stories and our obsession with the paranormal. The stories are ghost-written (pun intended, as claimed by the author who collects personal accounts from fans of the series) and range from poignantly sweet to downright horrific. Some remind me of the composition writing I received when I was teaching. Some are real and make me shiver at the sheer terror they evoke in me. We all grow up listening to stories about the pontianak, the penanggalan and the manananggal. The region shares similar stories about female ghosts who would detach their heads from their bodies. Their heads fly in the night, organs and entrails dangling beneath. the organs apparently glisten or shimmer. My relatives would talk about planting cactii around the house as protection. In the morning, so they say, they would find the penanggalan with her entrails snared and tangled by the cactii. For this SEA horror special, I will focus on two Southeast Asian horror writers.

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The Intersection: The Shape of Water

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I am a Guillermo del Toro fan. Mind you, I didn’t discover him until Pan’s Labyrinth in 2006, but I made up for it. (And if you haven’t seen The Devil’s Backbone and The Orphanage, you absolutely should.) So, when I heard he was doing a Creature From the Black Lagoon kind of film with extra-added romance, I was all in. The preview can be found here. My expectations, based upon the trailer, were something between Creature From the Black Lagoon and Edward Scissorhands. I thought it would be creepy and sad because that’s Guillermo del Toro’s work, and he does it very, very well. However, this time I was surprised. The film is gorgeous. All his films tend to be, and it’s obvious that every visual aspect is carefully chosen. The creature makeup and design was exactly right. The costumes are impeccable. I think the film is set in 1961 or possibly 1962.[1] The cast is amazing, and I was very happy to see Octavia Spencer. She’s wonderful as Zelda Fuller, Elisa Esposito’s coworker. Interestingly enough, this film is a Feminist one—unlike the original Creature From the Black Lagoon which features a monster kidnapping a white woman so he can have his way with her and a hero who must save her from being plundered. In this case, the two roles are switched. The villain in The Shape of Water is played by Michael Shannon and is a walking, talking sack of toxic masculinity which particularly fits the era—a time when square-jawed heroes featured heavily in film and literature. It was nice to see that role as the antagonist. Even the Russians (the standard Big Bad of the ’50s and ’60s) weren’t as awful. I appreciated that. 

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Paul Weimer’s Best of 2017 and Award Eligibility Post

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The year 2017. What a year, huh? Your humble correspondent was named the 2017 Down Under Fan Fund recipient. This means that I got to go on a subsidized trip to Lexicon, the 2017 New Zealand National SF convention, and Continuum, the 2017 Australia National SF convention. I’ve talked about it here, and on the podcast, and you can always still for a $7 donation get yourself a copy of the DUFF report. All donations go to the Fund so that in 2018, a NZ/AUS fan will come to the United States in a reciprocal trip to the one I took this year. The Down Under Fan Fund Report is eligible for nomination for the Hugo Award for Best Related Work. I myself am Hugo eligible for Best Fan Writer on the basis of that report, the reviews you read here, and the reviews and articles I have at Tor, BN Sci Fi, and elsewhere. And Skiffy and Fanty is eligible for best Fancast. (SFF Audio, which I am also on, is also Hugo-eligible,  by the way.)

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Horror review: Penny Reeve on A Skinful of Shadows by Frances Hardinge

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Although she’s been a name within the young adult horror/fantasy scene for a while now, Frances Hardinge was recently projected into the mainstream public gaze when her novel The Lie Tree won the 2016 Costa Book of the Year Prize. After such a bar was set with her last novel, Hardinge’s fans waited with bated breath for her newest, A Skinful of Shadows. Luckily it is an intricate and masterfully told coming-of-age tale, full of intrigue and more than a little creepy, which lives up to expectations. Plus, it was nominated for the Waterstones Book of the Year Award 2017. Take that, Costa. A Skinful of Shadows is a dark fantasy novel, set during the English Civil War. We meet our protagonist, Makepeace, as a young girl who lives in the attic of her Puritan uncle’s house, along with her mother. She is haunted by very realistic dreams of ghosts and other terrifying things, and to help her deal with her strange affliction, her mother often forces her to stay in a church overnight to deal with the demons in her head.

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Book Review: Windhome by Kristin Landon

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An expedition to an alien planet goes horribly wrong, and the survivors try and find their way amongst a most alien culture in Windhome, by Kristin Landon. Forced quickly to survive with reduced numbers and a fear of what has occurred, the expedition’s goal to make contact with the locals and find evidence of aliens who have ravaged worlds, including the very world they have landed on, is the core of the plot. The heart of the book, though, is the social and sociological relations the three human survivors have with the tall furred aliens who live on the cold and heavily glaciated planet. Windhome is very much in the grips of an ice age, with continental glaciers having marched as far as they have in our own world’s most recent glacial maximum. The author does an excellent job with designing an alien species, the Anokothu, living on such a world, especially one that has recently suffered devastation and loss that has only narrowed the margins of safety and surpluses needed for life. The author provides some twists to their biology that inform and help drive the narrative. This is an alien society that is more egalitarian in some ways, but in other ways the values of the aliens are orthogonal to those of human and human society. They may be humanoid and look in the vaguest sense like humans, but the author makes it clear that they are simply not humans with funny rubber masks. This is also true of other species on the world, which have analogues to Earth animals, but definitely are not. Their riding animals, for example, may be used in the way of horses, but they are dangerous carnivores, and have to be handled carefully.

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Book Review: The Dark Days Club by Alison Goodman

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If you ever thought Jane Austen needed more demon hunting, The Dark Days Club by Alison Goodman is the book for you. In Regency London, Lady Helen Wrexhall is preparing for her presentation to the queen. Her parents died under mysterious circumstances no one talks about except to mention the shame Lady Helen’s mother brought to the family. This means that Lady Helen must be a paragon in order to avoid the stain of such an association and marry well. Which makes it very inconvenient when she starts to manifest unusual abilities. Having grown up being able to read the tiniest signs of emotion in people’s faces, she starts to find herself filled with a restless energy. When one of her family’s housemaids goes missing, Lady Helen sets out to investigate. She finds herself drawn into a shadowy side of the world she never knew existed and to the Earl of Carleston. Through him she learns the truth of her abilities and must choose between her duty to her country and her desire to lead a normal life.

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