Category: Singapore

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Who chairs wins

 

 

On Friday, August 16th, two friends and I ventured into the Foochow Building on Singapore’s Tyrwhitt Road to experience Hardcore Island 2: A Fine City, the latest extravaganza staged by the Singapore Pro-Wrestling (SPW) association.  We’d been laggardly in getting there, having supped a beer too many in a nearby pub, and arrived near the end of the evening’s first bout: one between local wrestlers CK Vin and Emman.  As we entered the hall where the action was taking place, we were greeted by the sight of CK Vin throttling Emman with a folded chair.  He’d put the back chair-frame over Emman’s head and had the rear edge of the seat deep in his throat.  Unsurprisingly, soon afterwards, Emman submitted.

 

This, it transpired, was a ‘chairs match’ – which, Wikipedia informs me, is a contest where “only chairs can be used as legal weapons, but the only way to win is by pinfall or submission in the ring.”  I liked the publicity blurb with which the SPW presaged CK Vin and Emman’s fight: “You’ll want to get to your seats now before the wrestlers take them all for weapons.”

 

© Singapore Pro-Wrestling

 

Before I moved to Singapore, it’d been a long time since I watched a professional wrestling match.  In fact, I hadn’t been a fan of the sport since my boyhood in Northern Ireland.  This was when World of Sport, Independent Television’s Saturday-afternoon sports show, would always have a four o’clock slot devoted to what people in those days simply called ‘the Wrestling’.  Watching the Wrestling on TV, I quickly became obsessed with such larger-than-life figures as Les Kellett, Mark ‘Rollerball’ Rocco, Tally Ho Kaye, Jim Breaks, Mick McManus (catchphrase: “Not the ears! Not the ears!”), Big Daddy (catchphrase: “Easy! Easy! Easy!”), the gargantuan (six-foot-eleven, 685 pounds) Giant Haystacks and the mysterious, masked Kendo Nagasaki who claimed to be channelling “the spirit of a samurai warrior who, 300 years ago, lived in the place that is now called Nagasaki.”  (He himself lived in Wolverhampton.)  But I never got into the brasher, showier and slightly more glamorous pro-wrestling spectacles served up in subsequent decades by America’s World Wrestling Federation (WWF), later World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE).  And though for most of the 1990s I lived in Japan, I didn’t get into the super-popular New Japan Pro-Wrestling and All Japan Pro-Wrestling promotions either.

 

But I’d always enjoyed wrestling movies, such as Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler (2008) or Stephen Merchant’s Fighting with my Family (2019).  Okay, Mr. Nanny (1993) with Hulk Hogan not so much.  And it often occurred to me that I’d like to see some live bouts.  So, last year, when a mate told me of the existence of the SPW and invited me to one of their events, I thought, why not?

 

Anyway, back to tonight’s proceedings.  The second bout on the bill involved two more local wrestlers, Destroyer Dharma and Kentona – the former defeating the latter with a pinfall, which in wrestling jargon is when you hold your opponent’s shoulders against the ring-floor long enough for the referee to count to three.  Not for the last time that evening, the fighting spilled out of the confines of the ring and into the surrounding hall – much to the glee of the spectators, always happy to get a close-up view of the carnage.  I should say that the crowd was a pleasing mix of young and old, male and female, and Singaporeans and foreigners.  It was a far cry from the audiences I remember watching the 1970s British wrestling, which seemed to consist mainly of demented old grannies who’d hobble forward and club Mick McManus with their handbags whenever he was against the ropes.

 

 

The third battle tonight was a hotly anticipated one between Singapore’s Jack ‘N’ Cheese and the Gym Bros, who hail from Pattaya in Thailand.  Jack ‘N’ Cheese are BGJ, aka Jack Chong, described on his Instagram page as the ‘Beast of Benevolence’; and the Cheeseburger Kid, whose yellow cowl-mask makes him resemble a jaundiced Deadpool.  The latter has become a popular fixture of Singapore’s pro-wrestling world and tonight it looked like he had a mini-fan-club in tow – a small but voluble group in yellow T-shirts at the front of the crowd who cheered on his every move.  It has to be said of their opponents, the Gym Bros, that they were at least a wee bit camp.  One had a headful of Debbie-Harry-style blonde hair and wore white spats up to his knees. The other sported a weedy moustache and was clad in tight pink shorts whose contours left little to the proverbial imagination.

 

To the delight of everyone – bar the Gym Bros – Jack ‘N’ Cheese won the bout through another pinfall.  And nobody was more delighted than the Cheeseburger Kid, who reacted to victory by leaping up into BGJ’s arms and posing there for the cameras.

 

 

Next came a tussle between two more wrestlers from the SPW roster: Bryson Blade, wearing bad-boy black-leather pants, and Referee Ryan, who, appropriately for a person sometimes working as a referee, was attired in a more sober costume of black and white.  This was billed as a ‘Loser Gets Caned Match’.  The blurb for it declared, “…the loser will be forced to take a lashing with a Singapore cane post-match!  Gather round, people!  You’re about to be taken back, school assembly style.”  That references the fact that Singapore not only allows caning as a judicial punishment – a maximum of 24 strokes for a range of criminal offences – but also as a corporal punishment in schools, for male pupils who commit serious offences.  (Actually, it took me back, since corporal punishment was still legal in Northern Irish schools in the 1970s and I got caned a few times, though not with a Singaporean rattan cane but a beechwood one.)

 

 

Eventually, Referee Ryan lost through a pinfall and ended up receiving ‘five of the best’.   I wasn’t sitting near enough to the ring to be sure, but I suspect the cane-strokes may not have landed with the fullest possible force.

 

 

Following a 15-minute interval, bout number five saw another pair of Singaporean wrestlers in action, Zhang Wen and Riz. The former won, again by a pinfall.  Then came a trio of female wrestlers slugging it out in a three-way battle.  Representing Singapore in this scrap was the formidable Alexis Lee, who also goes under the moniker ‘Lion City Hit Girl’ and is the city-state’s very first lady pro-wrestler.  The Straits Times newspaper recently described her as “…a rampaging figure of death, who will stomp and slam her opponents swiftly and ruthlessly.”  I assume the Straits Times writer got the ‘figure of death’ idea from the white skull-make-up that covers half her face and her costume of tank-top, shorts and leggings patterned with bones and ribs.  Her foes tonight were two Japanese wrestlers, Miyu ‘Pink Striker’ Yamashita and Koya Toribami.  I know tori is the Japanese word for ‘bird’, which may explain why the latter fighter turned up in an elaborate, beaked bird-costume.

 

After a hard-fought contest – at one point the three of them were engaged in a sort of treble bearhug, with the bird-themed Koya Toribami caught in the middle like a piece of chicken in a chicken sandwich – Alexis Lee won with a pinfall.  Afterwards, outside the ring, she posed defiantly with a glass of beer, which she’d definitely earned.

 

 

The seventh and final bout was an all-Singaporean affair pitching two teams of three wrestlers against each other – the Horrors, consisting of Aiden Rex, Dr Gore and Da Butcherman, and the Midnight Bastards (billed in some quarters as ‘State of Bastards’), consisting of RJ, Mason and Andruew Tang, aka the Statement.  Despite being the co-founder of and head coach at SPW, Tang / the Statement has a villainous ring persona: “Embrace the Statement or I will make a statement out of you!”  This was billed as an ‘Xtreme Rules’ match, which meant there were no rules.  Not only chairs could be utilized as weapons, but also tables, a big wooden board that someone dragged out from under the ring, and even a stepladder.  Yes, I’d noticed how that stepladder had been parked all evening at the far end of the hall and wondered when it was going to come in handy.  It did when the spiky-mohawked Da Butcherman clambered up one side of it, and Andruew Tang, in gold-streaked trousers, clambered up its other side, and they faced off at the top.

 

 

At another point, the wrestlers hurriedly assembled, IKEA-style, a table in the ring.  Then someone poured dozens of small, multicoloured, plasticky things across the tabletop.  And soon after, an opponent got slammed down on the covered table, on his back.  Ouch!  One of my friends thought the plasticky things might be drawing pins.  I had a horrible suspicion, though, that they were pieces of Lego.  I remember how much my foot hurt after I stepped on a Lego-piece as a kid, so having your back thumped down against a whole table’s worth of those must be hellishly sore.

 

Anyway, thanks to yet another pinfall, the Horrors emerged victorious.  And that was it for the night.  Just to make the experience a little bit sweeter, on our way out, we encountered the Cheeseburger Kid standing at the Foochow Building’s entrance.  We told him how much we’d enjoyed his fight and he seemed to genuinely appreciate our warm words.

 

Certain sports purists might quibble about the tongue-in-cheek, even corny nature of some of what was on show tonight.  But the SPW’s get-togethers never fail to provide fun and excitement.  The city / island state of Singapore has a reputation for being a calm, ordered and well-run place, but it’s nice to think that there’s a little part of it where, thanks to the SPW, for an occasional few hours, good-natured anarchy takes over.  Where it becomes an anything-goes ‘lion city’ or a riotous ‘hardcore island’.  Where – to borrow a quote from Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist (2009) – “Chaos reigns!”

 

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Merry Christmas from Singapore

 

 

I don’t know if all Singaporeans love Christmas, but one thing’s for certain.  All Singaporean department stores love Christmas.  For instance, Tanglin Mall, which isn’t far from my workplace, has had a big Christmas tree up in front of its entrance since October.  That was before I’d even considered hanging up my orange, pumpkin-shaped fairy lights for Halloween.  Evidently, making a few extra bucks out of the festive season by starting it in mid-autumn was too good an opportunity to miss.

 

Meanwhile, the silvery monster of a Christmas tree pictured above this entry was to be found in the lobby of a much larger mall, Takashimaya.  (I’m absolutely not a fan of shopping centres, but Takashimaya has the saving grace of being home to Singapore’s best bookshop, Kinokuniya.)  When I was in there yesterday, I couldn’t believe the number of people who were swarming around the base of the tree, attempting to fit the thing into the backgrounds of their selfies.

 

Of course, the madness of celebrating Christmas in Singapore, or in any country that’s not far off the equator, is that on one hand you’re surrounded by Christmas cards and Christmas decorations featuring snow, icicles, frozen lakes, carol singers wrapped in overcoats and woollen hats, sleighs, reindeer, and a thousand other cold, wintery things.  While on the other hand, the temperature outside is in the thirties and the ground feels hot enough to fry an egg on.  This crazy incongruity was nicely captured by the committee at my local Hawkers’ Centre*, who this year decided to erect their Christmas tree beside a palm tree.

 

 

But anyway…  A very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all.

 

* A Hawkers’ Centre is a complex packed with stalls where you can buy all manner of food and drink at affordable prices.  In fact, in expensive Singapore, Hawkers’ Centres are probably the only places were foodies can indulge themselves without also bankrupting themselves.  

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Hungry like the Alpha Wolf

 

 

I remember sometime in the 1990s reading an interview with the late, legendary radio DJ John Peel, who was an enthusiastic proponent of extreme heavy metal.  Peel talked about the oddness of going to see a band like the aptly-titled Extreme Noise Terror and realising that he was three times the average age of the punters in the auditorium.

 

That was exactly how I felt a week-and-a-half ago when I went to Singapore’s Aliwal Arts Centre to attend a gig by the Australian metalcore band Alpha Wolf.  Such was the youthfulness of those around me, and such was my own feeling of decrepitude, that I wondered if I should just send myself up, impersonate Steve Buscemi in the popular Internet meme (taken from a 2012 episode of the TV show 30 Rock) and declare, “How do you do, fellow kids?”

 

Metalcore, Wikipedia informs me, “is a fusion genre combining elements of extreme metal and hardcore punk… noted for its use of breakdowns, which are slow, intense passages conducive to moshing.”  A list of metalcore bands I’ve found on the Internet contains such names as Killswitch Engage and the Dillinger Escape Plan, bands whose albums have resided in my record collection for many years.  Wow, I thought, I’ve owned metalcore music without even knowing it was metalcore! 

 

Meanwhile, when I looked at Alpha Wolf’s Wikipedia entry, I discovered that they’d taken their name from the 2011 Liam Neeson thriller The Grey, which is about the survivors of a plane crash in an uninhabited part of Alaska being picked off one-by-one by a pack of hungry wolves.  At one point, Neeson’s character, a wolf expert, explains that the beasts are led by a fearsome ‘alpha wolf, which is apparently the Alien Queen of the lupine world.  However, as the band come from Tasmania, I wonder if their name was also partly inspired by their island’s most famous extinct animal, the Tasmanian wolf.

 

 

One nice thing about the Alpha Wolf gig was that support was provided by not one, nor two, but three local bands.  It fascinates me that a place as famously orderly and respectable as Singapore can produce so many bands specialising in the supposedly disorderly and disreputable genre of heavy metal.  Those support bands were Tariot, Tell Lie Vision and the self-described ‘progressive metalcore’ Aggressive Raisin Cat, whom John Peel would probably have awarded a session on his BBC Radio 1 show on the strength of their name alone.  All three gave their sets their best shot and won the crowd’s appreciation.  My only quibble was that Aggressive Raisin Cat didn’t have an image of a raisin, or indeed, a cat, projected onto the backdrop behind them while they played.  Instead, there was a weird-looking spinning crisp.

 

 

The venue proved a rather austere place.  It was just a space with a stage at the front, and a mixing console and a merchandising stall in the back corners.  There wasn’t a bar, which meant that liquid refreshment had to be procured from the nearest branch of 7-11, which took a while to find, and led me to unfortunately miss some of Tariot’s set.  In between performances, most of the crowd would seep out onto the street outside to chat, smoke and imbibe a little – despite Singapore’s reputation for strictness, drinking in public is permitted until 10.30 pm.  Then, as soon as they heard the next band’s musicians striking their first chords, they’d hurry back inside again.

 

I’ve seen some videos by Alpha Wolf on YouTube, where they performed belters of songs like Black Mamba and Akudama, though thanks to the limited acoustics in the box-like, concrete-y confines of the arts centre auditorium, some of the shape and structure of those songs got lost a bit.  Still, the intensity of the headliners’ show couldn’t be faulted.  From the amount of moshing and crowd-surfing going on, and the fact that by the end of the set there seemed to be more folk on the stage than on the floor below, it was clear that Alpha Wolf had given the punters their money’s worth.

 

Just before the proceedings finished, a cake-and-candles were brought onstage for the celebration of someone’s birthday – I couldn’t see very clearly from my vantage point at the back of the venue, but the birthday-boy might have been the singer with Aggressive Raisin Cat – which struck me as a sweet, final touch.  What a nice bunch of lads, I thought.  To put it another way, despite the aural bombast, Liam Neeson should have nothing to fear if this Alpha Wolf was at his door.

 

© Open Road Films

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Jim Mountfield hunts for cryptids

 

© Sirens Call Publications

 

My short story The Watchers in the Forest, which is attributed to the pseudonym Jim Mountfield, can now be read in issue 62 – the summer 2023 edition – of the fiction and poetry magazine The Sirens Call.

 

Much of the writing in this issue is on the theme of cryptids – a ‘cryptid’ being defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “an animal (such as Sasquatch or the Loch Ness Monster) that has been claimed to exist but never proven to exist.”  Accordingly, the young hero of The Watchers in the Forest one day notices something strange in the woodland that rises at the end of his grandparents’ garden, woodland in which there have been reports of mysterious ape-like creatures, and unwisely goes to investigate…

 

As usual with The Sirens Call, issue 62 is the sort of bargain that’s rare nowadays.  It contains 274 pages and features 169 stories and poems, yet is available free of charge.  It can be downloaded here.

 

Incidentally, while we’re on the subject of ape-like cryptids, here are my five favourite examples of them from the real world.  Well, I don’t think any of them are real, but there have certainly been real reports about them.

 

The Big Grey Man of Ben Macdui

This is Scotland’s number-one simian-cryptid.  The Big Grey Man of Ben Macdui (Am Fear Liath Mòr in Gaelic) is a huge, hairy creature that’s supposed to follow and loom up terrifyingly behind lone hikers and climbers on the country’s second-highest peak, the often-misty Ben Macdui in the Cairngorm Mountains.  Alas, nice though the idea of ape creatures lurking in Cairngorms is, I’m inclined to attribute the sightings of the Big Grey Man to the creepy optical effect known as the Brocken Spectre.  This involves the sun casting your shadow from a high position onto mist, fog or cloud and making it look monstrous.

 

The Bukit Timah Monkey Man

Fabulously, an ape-like cryptid is rumoured to stalk my current abode, Singapore, the island city-state that has an area of just over 700 square kilometres and is the third most densely populated nation in the world.  If cryptids can escape detection here, they can do it anywhere.  It’s said the Bukit Timah Monkey Man was originally sighted in 1805 and most recently in 2020.  In the intervening two centuries, those who claim to have seen the beast include Japanese soldiers during their country’s occupation of Singapore in World War II.

 

The Monkey Man’s sightings have centred around the Singaporean district of Bukit Timah where, on the slopes of Bukit Timah Hill (Singapore’s highest peak at 164 metres) there’s a nature reserve with a population of crab-eating macaque monkeys.  It’s assumed that people have seen the real monkeys in poor visibility and distorting light conditions and mistaken them for the cryptid.  Though as the crab-eating macaques are at most a half-metre long, and the Monkey Man is supposed to walk upright at a height of 1.75 metres, it seems an odd mistake to make.

 

A fixture in Singaporean popular culture, the Bukit Timah Monkey Man is sometimes known by the abbreviation BTM, which makes him sound like a Korean-Pop boy-band.

 

The Monkey Man of Delhi

Delhi is no stranger to monkeys.  The last time I was in the city, in 2014, I couldn’t believe the size of the monkey-gangs that were roaming the streets in the neighbourhood of the Indian parliament.  They swaggered about as if they owned the place.  Predictably, I heard jokes from local people about the parliament being full of monkeys in more way than one.

 

 

However, in 2001, the city’s monkey phenomenon took a sinister turn with reports about the Monkey Man of Delhi.  According to eyewitnesses, this apparition was a simian-type creature that ranged from four feet to eight feet in height.  It was seen about 350 times and supposedly attacked and injured some 60 people, even causing a couple of deaths.  The Monkey Man of Delhi’s reign of terror has been attributed to mass hysteria, not unlike the Spring-Heeled Jack panic that gripped Britain nearly two centuries earlier.  Thus, the creature is probably more of an urban myth than a ‘real’ cryptid.

 

The Monkey Man of Delhi had some surprisingly human tastes in accessories.  His Wikipedia entry mentions how eyewitness accounts had him not only “covered in thick black hair” but also endowed with “a metal helmet, metal claws, glowing red eyes and three buttons” on his chest.  “Some reports also claim that the Monkey Man wore roller-skates.”

 

The Nittaewo

Sri Lanka, the country where I lived from 2014 to 2022, is also home to tales of anthropoid cryptids.  The Nittaewo were said to be a species of bipedal, tailless primates dwelling in the nation’s forests, with talon-like fingers and a strange language that resembled the twittering of birds.  According to the traditions of the Vedda people – who are believed to be Sri Lanka’s oldest human inhabitants – the Vedda fought against and finally destroyed the Nittaewo in the 18th century.  All the same, there have been alleged sightings of the Nittaewo since then, indeed, as late as 1984.

 

But if you go down to the Sri Lankan woods today and hear strange rustlings and twittering sounds coming from the undergrowth, you needn’t be too alarmed.  The Nittaewo were said to be three feet tall at most.  So if they did exist, they shouldn’t have looked any more threatening than a Hobbit.

 

The Yeti

Obviously, the Yeti, the Abominable Snowmen of the Himalayas, vie with Bigfoot as being the world’s most famous ape-like cryptids.  I like them for two reasons.  Firstly, they inspired the haunting, wistful song Wild Man by Kate Bush, released in 2011.  (“Lying in my tent, I can hear your cry echoing round the mountainside / You sound lonely…”)

 

Secondly, I used to see a yeti regularly in Colombo, the Sri Lankan capital.  The venerable street-side walkway on York Street in the city’s downtown area had a huge fibreglass yeti hulking behind, and glowering out through, one of its shop windows.  The thing had been created as an eye-catching advertising gimmick for a product called Yeti Isotonic Energy.  This was a rehydrating sports drink “developed in collaboration by Austrian and Sri Lankan scientists”, and bottles of it were on display in the same window.

 

I wonder if he’s still there today?

 

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Under the dome: the Flower Dome

 

 

A while ago, I described a visit my partner and I made to one of Singapore’s leading tourist attractions, the Gardens by the Bay.  Well, I described half of the visit, because I wrote only about our experiences at the Cloud Forest, a vegetation-draped artificial mountain in the controlled environment of one of the Bays’ two enormous domes.  So, here’s an account of our time in the other dome – the Flower Dome.

 

Having spent the late morning exploring the Cloud Forest, and before spending the early afternoon in the Flower Dome, we had lunch in a Gardens-by-the-Bay food-court called the Jurassic Nest.  (The place lived up to its name by having a pair of animatronic dinosaurs on the premises, a brontosaurus and a T-rex, that during our meal came to life, rather feebly, and growled a bit and wagged their heads at one another.)  It was here that the Internet coverage on my smartphone suddenly conked out, for the first time in the year since I’d bought it.  No amount of fiddling with the settings would get it back online.  This was a great nuisance, as I’d paid for entry into the Gardens’ two domes the night before and our e-tickets were in my Googlemail account, which I couldn’t access now.  When I tried to access the account on my partner’s phone, I wasn’t allowed in for ‘security’ reasons.  Then, just as we were leaving the food-court, and just as I’d resigned myself to having to buy a new pair of tickets for the Flower Dome, my phone’s Internet coverage suddenly and inexplicably returned.  We were able to show the original e-tickets at the entrance after all.

 

That outage was a mystery.  I even wondered if the copious water vapour inside the Cloud Forest had affected my phone and temporarily disrupted its online functions.  Anyway, on to the Flower Dome…

 

As domes go, the name ‘Flower Dome’ hardly conjures up the same excitement as, say, Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s (and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s) ‘Pleasure Dome’, or Public Enemy’s ‘Terrordome’, or the third Mad Max movie’s ‘Thunderdome’ (which was presided over by the great, and now sadly late, Tina Turner).  And it certainly feels a wee bit less dramatic than the Cloud Forest, which as I said contained its own mini-mountain.  The terrain here is relatively flat, though there’s a sunken area in the middle.  Spread over this is a host of not only flowers, but also shrubs, trees and other plants assembled from across the world, organised in sections representing ‘gardens’ from South Africa, South America, Australia, California and the Mediterranean.

 

 

The first part we explored after going in, up and along to the right of the entrance, was for me the most botanically interesting.  This was home to an array of baobabs, a tree I’ve always found fascinating because of its ungainly, bottom-heavy shape – well, I guess that’s why it’s also known as the ‘bottle tree’.  This part also featured the oddly named ‘Succulent Garden’, which was full of cacti, plants that hardly seem succulent.  The specimens were formidably spiky, thorny and quilled. PLEASE REFRAIN FROM TOUCHING THE FLOWERS said a sign here, unnecessarily.

 

 

As with the first dome, a variety of wooden statues and carvings, some of them traditional items from indigenous Asian cultures, others more modern in design, were occasionally positioned amid the vegetation.  I particularly like the Game–of–Thrones-style dragon perched on top of the knob of a truncated tree-trunk.  Later, after I’d descended to the lower level, this dragon looked very impressive seen at a distance and in silhouette.

 

 

At the time, the Cloud Forest had been hosting an exhibition relating to the 2022 movie Avatar: The Way of Water, which mainly featured life-sized fibreglass statues of characters and creatures from the movie plonked here and there in the foliage.  We were spared the Avatar stuff in the Flower Dome, although another exhibition was in progress – Sakura, which capitalised on Japan’s famous cherry-blossom season, typically occurring between late March and early April.  A mock-up of a traditional railway station in the Japanese countryside, with wooden platforms and buildings, had been installed in the lower level and was festooned with pink cherry blossoms.  Its ambience would have been charming if the site hadn’t been thronged with people snapping endless selfies of themselves in front of the pretty blossoms.  The majority of the culprits, I should add, weren’t members of the usually selfie-daft younger generation.  No, the crazed snappers were mostly senior citizens.  A few newly-married couples were also using the display as a backdrop for their wedding photos.

 

 

Though topographically less spectacular than the Cloud Forest, the Flower Dome’s flatter contours at least allow you to admire the dome itself, curving up over everything like a sky of multi-panelled glass.  According to the dome’s webpage, it actually contains 3332 glass panes.  It gives an impression of breathtaking spaciousness and it’s no surprise that it’s in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s biggest greenhouse.

 

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Under the dome: the Cloud Forest

 

 

A while back, my partner and I decided to tackle one of the to-do things on our Singaporean bucket-list and paid a visit to the city’s celebrated Gardens by the Bay.

 

Every day I get to view the Gardens, or at least the two huge domes that dominate them.  They’re visible from the bridge over Marina Bay that my bus crosses when I’m travelling to and from work.  With their exoskeletons of giant, curved ribs, the domes resemble a pair of gargantuan woodlice huddling in the vegetation not far from the Marina Bay Sands building (which is distinctive in appearance too – like a huge, futuristic version of one of the structures of standing stones and lintel stones at Stonehenge).

 

We entered the taller dome first.  It contains what’s known as the ‘Cloud Forest’ and, to quote the Gardens’ website, is “home to one of the world’s tallest indoor waterfalls and a lush mountain clad with plants from around the world.”  Our visit coincided with the dome hosting a temporary display called Avatar: The Experience.  For the most part, this meant that life-sized fibreglass representations of the Na’vi and other examples of the flora and fauna of Pandora, the planet featured in the James Cameron movies Avatar (2009) and Avatar: The Way of Water (2013), were positioned among the vegetation inside, allowing fans of the movies to pretend they were seeing them in the movies’ alien jungle.  Even if I’d been an Avatar enthusiast, which I’m not – I thought the first one was merely okay and I haven’t seen the second one – I would have found these annoying.  Their presence was a distraction from the works of ethnic / indigenous art, from such places as East Timor and Malaysia, that stand permanently amid the foliage.  Still, it wasn’t too difficult to ignore the Avatar paraphernalia, even if a lot of people – especially young kids – clustered around them taking selfies.

 

 

The dome’s main feature is a hulking, sandcastle-shaped mountain covered in a shaggy cloak of ferns, leaves, fronds, creepers, briars and occasional flowers.  However, like the volcano in the James Bond film You Only Live Twice (1967), the mountain isn’t what it first appears.  It’s not the secret HQ of a supervillain planning world domination, but behind the greenery festooning its exterior, it’s a structure of decks, terraces, lift-shafts and staircases.  Not only can you go up inside the mountain and look out from its various levels, but you can follow elevated catwalks that swirl away from it, past the tops of the surrounding trees, to the internal surface of the dome itself.

 

When we came through the entrance doors, we were struck by a chilly mixture of water droplets and water vapour emanating from the bottom of the waterfall mentioned on the website – really, five streams of water pouring down from five spouts near the mountain’s summit.  The water hits the ground near a Māori sculpture, made out of totora wood, slightly reminiscent of a Japanese torii, and unveiled there by Jacinda Ahern during a visit in 2022.  Thereafter, you need a couple of minutes to get accustomed to the organisation of the place.  To your right, the path takes you around the base of the artificial mountain.  Above you, the catwalks encircle the mountain like hula-hoops swinging around a burly torso.  And above and beyond everything else, the dome’s glass extends in a massive, curved grid of steel.  At the time, three cleaners in abseiling-like harnesses were working their way down the outside of the dome, scrubbing it with long-handled brushes, sluicing it with jets of water, and looking absolutely tiny.

 

 

A lift took us to the mountain’s top.  From there, you gradually descend, enjoying the different levels’ views and wandering along the catwalks as they loop out and back again.  Amid the botanical displays at the very top is one containing pitcher plants, bladderworts, butterworts, sundews and Venus flytraps – yes, it’s a collection of carnivorous plants.  The Venus flytraps are contained in a couple of glass globes suspended above the display, their fanged maws sprouting from masses of soil and plant-matter. This was the first time I’d seen the famously fly-hungry plant for real and I was surprised by how small it was.  Despite its diminutive size, it still looked sinister, like a vicious, vampiric little Pac-Man.

 

 

Obviously, we took advantage of the catwalks.  These lead you away from the mountain, past the treetops, and right to the dome’s inside surface, where you can peer out through the last leaves and stems at such Singaporean landmarks as the aforementioned Marina Bay Sands building or the Singapore Flyer, the observation wheel that looms over the Formula One track.  It feels like being an explorer who’s just set eyes on the great, lost city of Singapore from the edge of a giant jungle-clearing.

 

 

Beneath the mountain, on a basement level, there’s an area known as the Secret Garden.  Threads of water leak down from the complex above, into what seems a congested and chaotic muddle of ferns, shrubs, branches, vines and flowers – though this being Singapore, it’s no doubt highly structured and organised in reality.  One reason why I liked the Secret Garden was because of its collection of sculptures, made from gnarly and sprawling segments of tree-trunk, tree-branches and tree-roots.  Not only have these been trimmed, smoothed and varnished, but among them lurk cunningly-hidden, carved animals. Thus, a zig-zagging chunk of tree-trunk that serves as a garden-bench has, skulking along its surface, a crocodile’s head; while a twisting, tangled section of treetop, erected like a statue, is home to a wolf reposing along one of its branches.

 

 

The dome’s temperature is controlled and kept to an agreeably cool level.  It made a pleasant change to be able to walk amid nature in Singapore for an hour and not end up drenched in sweat.

 

As I said, the Avatar exhibits (which also included cubicles in the basement-area where you could get your photo taken and have it superimposed on a Pandoran landscape, and an animatronic dragon-creature that threateningly stirred and crankily growled), didn’t impose too much on our Cloud Forest experience.  The biggest imposition was probably when we found ourselves sharing a lift with an incredibly excited wee boy, who was enthusing to his mother about how wonderful the dome was because it was so full of Avatar stuff.  Then he became aware of my surly, bearded presence behind him, turned around, looked up at me, and declared, “I love you, Mr Klingon,” before kissing my belt-buckle.  Well, that was unexpected.  Though if I had to be mistaken for an alien species, I would far rather it was a grumpy warrior race who dress like they’re in a 1980s heavy metal band and say cool things like, “Surrender or die!”, rather than a wimpy bunch of blue-skinned James Cameron-ian space-hippies like the Na’vi.

 

Then we headed for the other dome at Gardens by the Bay, the Flower Dome.  But that’s a topic for another blog-post.

 

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The honour system

 

 

Singapore, where I’ve been living for the past year, has a reputation for being a safe and law-abiding place.  That’s a reputation I can attest to.  At no point, anywhere in the city-state, have I sensed any physical threat to myself or my property.  Admittedly, the local newspapers contain a lot of stories about scams and scammers, and I usually receive two or three scam calls – very obvious scam calls – a week.  Mind you, when I check the numbers, some of these calls seem to originate in Thailand or Malaysia, so they’re not all the fault of Singaporeans.

 

But the impression of Singapore being law-abiding was truly brought home to me the other week when, one morning, I toddled along to my local bus-stop to catch a bus into work and saw what had been attached to the bus-stop sign.  Evidently, someone had dropped their wallet while waiting there, and someone else had found it.  Not only had that someone else not succumbed to temptation and pocketed the wallet, but he or she hadn’t taken it to the nearest police station and handed it in.  No, someone else had simply popped the wallet into a plastic bag and stuck it to the sign, along with a sheet of paper announcing the wallet-owner’s name, and left it there with the presumption that sooner or later the owner would return and find it.  And in the meantime, nobody else going past the bus-stop would be tempted to sneak off with it.

 

The wallet hung there for the next three days.  On the fourth morning, I arrived at the bus-stop and saw that it was gone.  Had the wallet finally found its way back to its owner?  This being Singapore, I strongly suspect it had.

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Anvil show their mettle on metal

 

 

Warning — this post contains spoilers for Anvil! The Story of Anvil.

 

2008’s Anvil! The Story of Anvil is surely one of the best rock-music documentaries ever made.  It unflinchingly charts the multiple mishaps that befall Toronto heavy-metal band Anvil during the early 21st century.  Two decades earlier, Anvil had seemed on the cusp of making the big time – for instance, they’d headlined the 1984 Super Rock Festival in Japan alongside Bon Jovi, Whitesnake and the Scorpions – but then they’d faded into obscurity.  However, they never stopped playing and recording, albeit for small (sometimes non-existent) audiences and a very limited fanbase.  Watching The Story of Anvil, I got the impression that the reason for the band’s lack of success was simply a run of bad luck, both catastrophic and comical.

 

For its first 20 minutes, I found The Story of Anvil hilariously funny.  It was as amusing as the legendary spoof ‘rockumentary’ This is Spinal Tap (1984).  Indeed, it seemed ironic that Anvil’s drummer had the same name as This is Spinal Tap’s director, Rob Reiner.  Well, almost – Robb the drummer has two ‘b’s in his first name, whereas Rob the director has one ‘b’.

 

But as the disappointments, disagreements and disasters mount up, as the viewer is subjected to a relentless series of empty concert venues, booking mishaps, record label rejections and scenes where singer / lead guitarist Steve ‘Lips’ Kudlow gamely struggles on with his day job, which is delivering trolleys of pre-packaged, catering-company meals through Canadian blizzards, the film stops being funny.  As the fact sinks in that Anvil is a real band, not a fictional one like Spinal Tap, whose middle-aged members are striving to do the thing they love in the face of massive and soul-destroying odds, the film becomes rather tragic.  Particularly gruelling is the scene where, trying to scrape together some money to fund the recording of a new album, Kudlow takes on one of the worst jobs on earth, as a telemarketer.  When it comes to giving people unwanted phone calls and trying to persuade them to buy unwanted products, he’s as successful at it as I would be – he’s miserably crap at it.

 

As the film neared its end, I found myself pleading for the band to have one, just one sustained piece of good luck.  When they’re invited to perform at a three-day music festival in Japan, it looks like the good luck has finally arrived.  But no, they’re then informed that they’re scheduled to play the very first slot on the very first day, coming onstage in the morning when it’s unlikely that most of the audience will have turned up yet…  By this point, I’d concluded that The Story of Anvil was an exercise in utter nihilism, warning about the folly of trying to chase your creative dreams and not accepting your fate as a catering-company delivery man or (in Reiner’s case) a construction worker.  However, in a final twist, the documentary shows the band trudging despondently onstage at the Japanese festival, just before noon, and discovering to their joy that the auditorium is in fact packed with appreciative fans.  Talk about a cathartic finale.  I exhaled such a huge sigh of relief that I almost deflated over my cinema seat.  (Though now that I think about it, and having lived in Japan, I could have told Kudlow and Reiner that you can always depend on the Japanese to show up on time.)

 

It probably wasn’t how they’d wanted to re-establish their name, but The Story of Anvil was such a critical and commercial success that the band got their second wind on the back of it.  Since then, they’ve played at major heavy-metal festivals like Download, Hellfest and Wacken Open Air, provided support for the likes of Metallica and AC/DC and had their songs featured in the soundtracks of movies like It (2017) and TV shows like The Simpsons (1989-present).  Currently, the band is on its Impact is Imminent tour, the East Asian leg of which brought them to my current abode, Singapore, a week ago.

 

 

The weather that evening was the sort of thing that could have appeared in The Story of Anvil as a bad-luck factor stopping an audience from attending one of their gigs.  It’d rained torrentially since the start of the afternoon and there was still no sign of it easing off when I arrived at the venue, the Esplanade Annex Studio, just before eight o’clock.  At least the rain-drenched view outside the studio, of Singapore’s skyscraper-choked Central Area on the far side of the waters where the Singapore River reaches Marina Bay, had an evocatively Blade Runner-type vibe.

 

I was dreading what I’d find when I entered the Annex Studio.  An empty or near-empty auditorium, signalling that the Curse of Anvil had returned?  Or a strictly regulated, typically Singaporean venue with row upon row of seats, where there was no space to get up, move around and shake a leg – imagine having to sit during a heavy-metal concert?  Or worst of all, a combination of both, a place packed with seats but devoid of people?  Thankfully, the interior was seat-less and, while it wasn’t full yet, it seemed to be filling at a steady pace.  I was also pleased to see that a makeshift bar had been installed in a back corner, courtesy of Singapore’s premiere heavy metal-themed pub, the Flying V Metal Bar on Coleman Street.  Among the offerings on its menu were ‘Iron Maiden Trooper Beer’.  Well, with a name like that, I just had to sample a pint of it.  And then I sampled another pint.  And then I sampled another….

 

 

There was a decent-sized crowd present when the support band, local outfit Deus Ex Machina, came on and performed a well-received set.  I liked how the standard heavy-metal T-shirts, long hair and beards sported by 80% of the band contrasted with the appearance of the singer, who had a sensible haircut and was in a sensible short-sleeved shirt and looked like he’d just arrived after a (slightly dress-down) day at the office.  This being Singapore, perhaps he had.

 

Then Anvil came onstage and it was immediately clear how much love there was for them in the room.  While they opened with their instrumental number March of the Crabs (which wasn’t inspired by pubic lice or even by the horror novels of Guy N. Smith, but by Kudlow’s observation that his hand had to move crab-like up and down his guitar strings as he played it) from the 1982 album Metal On Metal, Kudlow wasted no time in leaving the stage and joining the audience below.  At which point, he disappeared amid a sea of adoring fans and amid a forest of arms holding smartphones aloft to film him.

 

 

There ensued 90 minutes of gloriously old-school heavy metal, the tunes interspersed with crowd-pleasing banter from Kudlow.  He got a knowing and affectionate cheer when he introduced one song as being about sticking with your dreams and never giving up, which obviously he knew all about.  He also delivered an anecdote about an encounter with the late, legendary Lemmy, though to be honest his Lemmy impersonation sounded more like Dick Van Dyke’s chimney-sweep in Mary Poppins (1964) than the famously gravelly tones of the frontman of Motorhead.  Generally, after the indignities they’d suffered in The Story of Anvil, it was a tonic to see them up on stage 15 years later, thoroughly enjoying themselves – even if a moment where Kudlow and bassist Chris Robertson saluted each other got a bit Alan Partridge-esque.  The gig also demonstrated what an excellent drummer Robb Reiner is.  A couple of times during the film, he’d been shown at the end of his tether and threatening to quit the band.  Well, I’m glad he didn’t.

 

 

The closing number was probably their best-known song, the title track of Metal on Metal, which was the one featured on The Simpsons and which kicks off with the memorable lines, “Metal on metal / It’s what I crave / The louder the better / I’ll turn in my grave!”  After which, Kudlow couldn’t resist descending into the crowd again.  This time, it seemed like everyone in the venue managed to take a selfie with him.  Well, not everyone.  I didn’t want to break my phone-camera by taking a picture of my bleary, aged, worse-for-wear features.  But I did make a point of going up to him, shaking his hand and thanking him and his band for a job well done tonight.

 

It’s a job he’s still doing, against the odds, and a job he obviously loves.  A lucky man – at last.

 

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Singapore unmasked

 

From unsplash.com / © Brian Asare

 

Earlier this month Singapore’s Ministry of Health announced that it no longer perceived Covid-19 as a threat and the city-state’s ‘disease-response level’ would be lowered from ‘green’ to ‘yellow’.  For those people visiting Singapore, this means they no longer have to buy Covid-19 travel insurance, and visitors not fully vaccinated no longer have to show test results to prove their uninfected status.  It also looks like Singapore’s Trace Together app – something I had to constantly use when I arrived here a year ago, and without which I would probably have spent my first few months living on the streets – will be discontinued.  The most noticeable relaxation of all, however, is that, since February 13th, face-masks are no longer compulsory on Singapore’s public transport system. *

 

Thus, riding Singapore’s buses – as I normally do twice a day, to get to and from work – has been a strange experience during the past week.  I’ve had to mentally adjust to seeing the entirety of other passengers’ faces.  Not that all of them aren’t wearing masks now, of course.  A lot of passengers still are, mostly, I have to say, the Singaporeans ones.  It’s largely passengers from the country’s sizeable Western community who are suddenly, brazenly flaunting their facial features for the first time in a couple of years.

 

Perhaps I’m just odd, but I don’t actually mind people wearing masks around me.  The masks make me take more notice of their eyes, the windows of the soul, and create a general air of mystery.  “What marvellously alluring eyes that person has,” I might say to myself.  “But I wonder what lurks lower down, concealed by their mask?  Perchance a mouthful of Shane McGowan-style dental work?”  Such are the thoughts I entertain as I make the 45-minute bus journey to and from my workplace in central Singapore.  “Could that masked person be a gorgeous Singaporean equivalent of Selina Kyle, aka Catwoman from Batman?  Or do they really resemble Lon Chaney Sr, from The Phantom of the Opera (1925)?”  And in fact, I’ve seen a number of articles in the past few years claiming that a Covid-19 mask adds to a person’s aura of attractiveness.

 

It’s no surprise that an East Asian country like Singapore has stuck with its mask mandate for so long (way after Western ones have abandoned them), and its population has happily complied with it.  Wearing a surgical mask when you’re unwell with something that might be contagious has never been a big deal in this part of the world.  It was one of the first things I noticed when I started working in Asia, in Japan back in 1989 – folk suffering from a cold or a dose of the flu would mask up to avoid passing something on to their fellow citizens.  Indeed, the surgical mask is so engrained on Japanese culture that there’s even a well-known figure of urban folklore, Kuchisake Onna, whose gimmick is that she wears one.  Since Kuchisake Onna is a homicidal spirit who takes the form of a seemingly beautiful woman, that mask has a macabre function.  It conceals a grotesquely widened mouth, its ends cut open as far as the ears.

 

© JollyRoger

 

Inevitably, the implementation of measures against Covid-19 was, in the West at least, immediately incorporated into the culture wars that these days rage between the right and the left in just about every area of politics and society.  The sort of people who rant and rave against woke universities, LGBT rights, asylum seekers, critical race theory, restrictions on gun ownership, taking action against climate change and, in the latest manifestation of right-wing insanity, the so-called ’15-minute city’, have spent the last three years rupturing their hernias about mask mandates, lockdown orders and Covid-19 vaccinations.  In the USA, millions of gun-toting, Trump-loving, QAnon-believing macho-men pooped their pants in rage when it was suggested that they don a small piece of cloth over their mouths and nostrils to prevent them getting a virus and, equally importantly, prevent them possibly passing it on to their fellow human beings. The very thought of such a thing was a violation of their rights and ’freeee-dum’, apparently.

 

The UK was also beset with Covid-19-induced whinging, most notably at alleged news station – though these days it’s more a drop-in centre for conspiracy-theory nutjobs – GB News.  Much of it emanated from GB News pundit and supposed archaeologist Neil Oliver, whose schtick is to stare ashen-faced into the camera for six, seven, eight minutes or more and deliver a doom-laden monologue of right-wing paranoia, dog-whistles, unsubstantiated claims and windy, overwrought rhetoric that his hard-of-thinking viewers probably think is Shakespearean.  He’s spent much of the pandemic lamenting about anti-Covid-19 measures and how, say, they’ve deprived children of a vital, communal story-telling tradition that’d hitherto existed unbroken since tribal campfires on the far side of the Ice Age.  Or some drivel like that.

 

© GB News / From indy100.com

 

Oliver’s nadir came in 2021 when he declared, “If your freedom means that I might catch Covid from you, then so be it.  If my freedom means that you might catch Covid from me, then so be it.”  And presumably, if the person who caught it from him was a highly-at-risk octogenarian or person with serious underlying health issues who didn’t want to catch Covid-19 from anybody…  Well, tough shit.  At least they’d die of the virus with their freedom intact, which was the important thing.

 

Then, swooping off into realms of total doolally-ness, Oliver likened the Covid-sceptic minority in Britain, himself included presumably, to the pilots who flew Spitfires and Hurricanes against the Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain: “They risked everything for freedom.”  Forgive me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the entire population of Britain during World War II surrender a whole bunch of their freedoms whilst trying to unite against, and overcome, an external threat?  I can’t imagine Oliver lasting long in London in 1940 if he’d insisted on having his houselights blazing every night because doing so was in the name of ‘freedom’.  Yeah, leave my rights alone, Mr Churchill!

 

Anyway, for the foreseeable future, I’ll continue to wear a face-mask while I use Singapore’s public transport system.  I’ve had Covid but my partner hasn’t.  Though she’s fully vaxed and boostered up, she probably hasn’t developed the level of immunity to it that I have, and I’d hate to bring the thing home one day and pass it onto her.  Also, I’m not convinced we’re out of the woods yet with Covid.  I’m sure it’s possible that future, nasty variants will appear and wreak more havoc.  And thirdly, I’ll keep wearing my mask because it’s the sort of gesture that Neil Oliver would wholly despise.

 

And if it’s despised by him, it must be the right thing to do.

 

From unsplash.com / © Anshu A

 

* Face masks still have to be worn, though, in Singapore’s hospitals.

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More sinister sides of Singapore

 

© Epigram Books

 

A couple of months ago on this blog, I reviewed an anthology of horror stories set in modern-day Singapore called, appropriately, The New Singapore Horror Collection, written by local author S.J. Huang.  Now I’ve just finished reading a collection called Fright 1, containing 11 more scary stories set in the southeast Asian city-state, which my partner was kind enough to buy for me as a Christmas present.

 

Unlike The New Singapore Horror Collection, each story in Fright 1 is penned by a different person.  These 11 writers were the top-ranking entrants in a short-fiction competition held last year.  As the book’s introduction explains, Fright 1 “showcases the winners and finalists of the 2022 Storytel Epigram Horror Prize, and celebrates all subsets of the horror genre, told with a Singaporean twist.”

 

The first thing that struck me about Fright 1 was the preponderance of female writers – eight out of 11.  This might be a surprise to the many people who’ve traditionally associated the horror genre with male writers, although anyone familiar with the work of Angela Carter, Shirley Jackson, May Sinclair, Daphne du Maurier, Anne Rice, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and the criminally underrated Dorothy K. Haynes, to say nothing of Mary Shelley, would argue otherwise.  Thus, the collection was doubly interesting for me.  Not only did its stories have a setting, Singapore, that I’m not very familiar with, but many of its themes were ones that impact on women – arranged marriages, pregnancy, sexting and, generally, being wronged by duplicitous men.  These being horror stories, such themes are refracted through a lens that sends them into the realm of the supernatural and macabre.

 

Fright 1 gets off to a solid start with Meihan Boey’s The General’s Wife, which is set in past times and is about an unremarkable young woman (‘with crooked shoulders and a pockmarked face’) whose family are desperate to get her married off to someone, anyone, so that they no longer have to be responsible for her.  When a mysterious, older, wealthy man known as the ‘General’, living on one of Singapore’s little satellite islands, requests her hand in marriage for no obvious reason, they don’t ask questions.  She’s hurriedly packed off to the island.  What follows is a tale of skulduggery involving deceit and sorcery, with suggestions of Bluebeard and even Jane Eyre (1847), impressively told and grippingly paced.  My only criticism is that I found the ending slightly rushed, although it contains a satisfying hint that the story’s narrator is no longer the shrinking violet she used to be.

 

Also set in historical Singapore is Dew M. Chaiyanara’s Under the Banana Tree, which is about a kampung – the Malaysian term for village – that’s terrorised by a pontianak when it takes up residence by the tree of the title and starts making “agonised wails that pierced the night and made all the villagers rush to slam their windows shut, bolt their doors and hold each other tight.”  According to Wikipedia, a pontianak is a supernatural creature found in Singaporean, Malaysian and Indonesian folklore that “usually takes the form of a pregnant woman who is unable to give birth to a child.  Alternatively, it is often described as a vampiric, vengeful female spirit.”  A woman in the village – evidently the only person there with a spine – resolves to go and tell the ponianak to, basically, shut up.  To her surprise, she finds herself developing a bond with the creature.  She also learns that they have more in common that she could ever have imagined.

 

Meanwhile, a non-folkloric and very modern supernatural being is devised for Kelly Leow’s story Breakwater.  This posits the idea that people subjected to extreme humiliation on social media, so that their lives are ruined, they end up living in shame and they vanish from their former social circles, actually, to a certain extent, ‘die’.  Not enough to leave behind a ghost, as many people believe happens when you physically die, but enough to create a semi-ghost, a ‘shade’.  Breakwater features a serial online-abuser being trailed, unbeknownst to him, by the shades of his former victims – one of which partly narrates the story.  I liked Breakwater a lot, not only because its central conceit feels genuinely new, but also because it’s set in Singapore’s East Coast Park.  The park is at the back of my residence and is an evocative place at night, one where, as Leow observes, “Cargo ships form a ghostly city out on the horizon, lights glittering in rows like the windows of apartments.”

 

Among the male writers represented, Teo Kai Xiang’s Untitled Train Story uses another well-known part of Singapore as its setting, the city’s MRT system.  Workers digging out a new MRT line discover a mysterious tunnel that seems to have existed a long time before trains began running underground.  It’s apparently man-made, its walls are covered in strange symbols, and it’s formed out of some ‘sleek and almost metallic black substance’.  I began the story wondering if it would turn into a Singaporean variant on H.P. Lovecraft’s seminal story Pickman’s Model (1927), which helped establish the trope, now common in the horror genre, of fleshing-eating, ghoul-like creatures living in secrecy under the streets of a modern-day city – see, for example, the movies Death Line (1973) and C.H.U.D. (1984).  Later, however, it becomes clear that Xiang’s story has more in common with a different strand of Lovecraft’s work – his tales of cosmic horror.  There’s something at the end of the tunnel that isn’t just deadly.  It also has the power to do disturbing things to the minds of those who encounter it and manage to survive.

 

For my money, however, the collection’s best tale is Dave Chua’s Hantu Hijau, which in Malay means ‘green ghost’.  It’s narrated by a young girl who becomes obsessed with a ghost, a female one, that’s said to haunt her Singaporean public housing estate: “Some doubted her existence; merely a hyper-localised myth to get children to return early and in bed before eleven, but I knew she had always been here, biding her time.”  The story is atmospheric and also manages the important trick of making the reader both frightened of its ghost and sympathetic towards it.  At the same time, Chua makes it believable by lacing the supernatural plot with descriptions of the block and its assorted inhabitants (“Despite the decrepit state of some of the storeys, the residents were full of kindness and humanity”) and with accounts of the girl’s mum – a hard-pressed single mother whose desperate attempts to make money and keep them afloat gradually become shady and even criminal.  With its blend of the ghostly, the grittily realistic and an urban myth that might not be so mythical, Hantu Hijau reminded me slightly of the Clive Barker story The Forbidden (1986), which later became the basis for the Candyman movies.

 

Not quite everything in the collection was to my tastes.  I felt a few stories had rather too much happening for them to be properly frightening.  Also, a couple of times, the social issues being explored were used for ‘body-horror’ moments that had me thinking of films like David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979) or Brian Yuzna’s Society (1989) – good, grotesquely-surreal fun, yes, but too far-fetched for the build-up that’d preceded them.  Maybe it’s just me.  I feel that to be truly scary, a story has to be at least partway believable.  But if it contains too many incidents, or too much over-the-top gloop, it becomes less believable and hence less scary.  Overall, though, I was impressed by Fright 1  and I strongly recommend it.

 

For the record, the 2022 Storytel Epigram Horror Prize judges ranked Dew M. Chaiyanara’s Under the Banana Tree as the third-best entry, Dave Chua’s Hantu Hijau as the runner-up, and Kelly Leow’s Breakwater as the winner.  The collection can be purchased here, as can an audiobook version of it.