© Spiral Tower Press
Rab Foster, the pseudonym under which I write fantasy – and usually the sweaty sub-genre of fantasy known as sword-and-sorcery – fiction, has just had a second short story published this month. Entitled The Ghost Village, it appears in issue 8 of the magazine Whetstone from Spiral Tower Press.
Described by editor Jason Ray Carney as straddling ‘the line between folk horror and sword and sorcery’, The Ghost Village was inspired by Thailand’s San Phra Phum or, as they’re known in English, Thai spirit houses. These are the miniature buildings you see outside nearly every Thai home and business, held aloft like bird-tables on wooden pillars, fragranced by smouldering incense sticks and often garlanded with flowers. Their raison d’être is to provide accommodation for the spirits residing on the premises and to keep those spirits contented, so that they don’t move into the human building and cause ghostly high-jinks there.
Once, when I was in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai, I was passing a construction site. An old building had just been demolished and a new one was about to be built there. Nearly everything in the area had been flattened and a digger was prowling around, removing the last of the rubble. But remaining untouched and intact in the middle of the site were a pair of spirit houses. Apparently, it’s a bad idea to destroy spirit houses and render their inhabitants homeless. So even Thai developers who wouldn’t think twice about bulldozering an old human property need to exercise caution in how they treat the miniature dwelling next door to it.
I had long wanted to write a creepy story about Thai spirit houses, but was wary of penning something that used Thai people’s religious beliefs and cultural practices for a cheap scare. As someone who’s lived long-term in Asia and Africa, I find stories that have Westerners blundering into ‘exotic’ – shorthand for ‘less civilised’ – countries where they run foul of some local deity, myth or piece of folklore extremely patronising. Basically, they steal a bit of someone else’s culture to use as a monster or some other source of horror. So, it made sense to me to take the basic concept of spirit houses – flesh-and-blood people maintaining a second house where beings from the incorporeal world can reside – and put it in a fantasy context instead. Then I could build up my own mythology around it. What I ended up with was Rab Foster’s latest published story, The Ghost Village.
For more information about Whetstone magazine, click here. And issue 8, which contains my story and a dozen other works of short fiction and poetry, can be downloaded here for free.