Haw Par Villa – Blood and Porridge

August 17, 2026

Attack ‘n’ Byrne

In the past few weeks I’ve been fortunate enough to attend two of the best musical concerts I’ve ever experienced. Both took place at Singapore’s Star Theatre.

On July 29^th, the Star hosted the English trip-hop collective Massive Attack. Formed in Bristol in 1988 by Robert ‘3D’ Del Naja, Grant ‘Daddy G’ Marshall, Adrian ‘Tricky’ Thaws and Andre ‘Mushroom’ Vowles, Massive Attack is less massive in terms of members nowadays. Only 3D and Daddy G remain, Tricky and Mushroom having left in 1995 and 1999 respectively. What we got on July 29^th still sounded massive, though.

In the 1990s, I loved the band. Their three albums from that decade, Blue Lines (1991), Protection (1994) and Mezzanine (1999), are all-time favourites of mine. I found their sound irresistible: its hypnotic melodies, its measured pace, its building crescendos, its atmospherics, its lurking orchestral grandeur – composer John Barry never seemed far away – and, unpinning everything, its relentless drums and basslines. After hearing them, I had a hard time getting songs like the soaring Unfinished Symphony or the sublimely restless Safe from Harm from Blue Lines, or the haunting Teardrop from Mezzanine, out of my head.

My ultimate Massive Attack song, though, was Mezzanine’s Angel, which after a slow but remorseless build-up lets fly two minutes and 19 seconds in. That’s the best crescendo in music ever. It would make a terrific accompaniment to a movie sequence where there’s a brooding sense of unease, then an explosion of action. It has been used in films, actually, but the only one I’ve heard it in was the forgettable 2004 remake of Robert Aldrich’s The Flight of the Phoenix (1965). I know it turned up in Guy Ritchie’s Snatch (2000) too, but I’ve never watched that one.

The one time I saw them live during the 1990s was in insalubrious circumstances. They played at the now-defunct Scottish music festival T in the Park in 1999. The crowd was boozed-up and raucous and I’d been at the front of it all afternoon, before they performed, watching earlier bands on the bill. These included the then-popular rock band Reef. While Reef were playing, someone bodysurfed past me and accidentally struck me in the head with a boot. A week previously, I’d been the victim of an assault, which resulted in me getting multiple stitches in the back of my head in an A and E department. The body-surfer’s boot opened those stitches and blood leaked out everywhere, including down my face. Consequently, when Massive Attack came on, I looked like I’d just strolled off the set of a horror movie.

It didn’t help that a crowd-member then flung a bottle at the stage, which smashed down close to their frequent collaborator, the reggae roots singer Horace Andy. They continued playing, but looked extremely pissed off. (They should have followed the example of Jim Kerr, the frontman of Simple Minds. Supposedly, once, when somebody chucked a bottle at Simple Minds during a Parisian gig, he told the crowd, “I hope whoever threw that dies of cancer.”)

So, what a contrast to see them again, 27 years later, from a vantage point high in the circle of the grand and comfortable Star Theatre. On the stage, 3D, Daddy G and their team of travelling musicians were ensconced, in near-darkness for much of the time, among their instruments and consoles while the theatrics were provided by dazzling visuals that materialised on giant screens above them to accompany each song. In fact, ‘visuals’ is too lame a word to describe what the audience saw. A reviewer in Australian Musician wrote that the band used “monolithic LED screens, archival footage, political imagery and dreamlike sequences to create a constantly shifting portrait of a world where personal freedom, privacy and even human emotion are increasingly commodified.”

As the visuals shifted wrenchingly from the picturesque Swiss lakeside city of Zug (where much equity money ends up, apparently) to Africa and impoverished locals having to dig up precious minerals in wretched conditions, from worrying graphics illustrating the global reach of mass surveillance to gibbering headlines about celebrities, from Peter Thiel quotations about why democracy is a bad idea to bald statements that could have come from 1984’s Ministry of Truth (‘WHAT IS PURPOSE?’), I was reminded of the work of radical documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis. Later, I learnt that Curtis and the band have enjoyed a long association and he worked with them to put these digital displays and film clips together.

Not that the visual show was entirely serious. I was delighted to see the great horror actor Bruce Campbell get chased through a cabin by the forces of darkness in The Evil Dead (1982) while a message flashed up telling us we can’t escape ‘the algorithm’. Later, another great horror actor, Boris Karloff, appeared as the title character in The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) in an ironic commentary on the West’s tendency to blame China for everything. (See Covid-19.)

Musically, it was superb. The crowd gave roars of appreciation for Horace Andy, singing on three tracks, including – yes! – Angel; and for other longtime collaborators Deborah Miller, singing on Unfinished Symphony and Safe From Harm, and Elizabeth Fraser, who did vocal duties on Mezzanine’s Black Milk and Group Four and a cover of Tim Buckley’s Song to the Siren (1970). Fraser also brought the evening to a perfect close with the final song, Teardrop.

The gig was overshadowed by an incident at the end when, briefly, 3D and Daddy G brandished a Palestinian flag onstage. Singapore’s Straits Times newspaper reported that this broke a local law forbidding “the public display of foreign national emblems without a permit or exemption.” Afterwards, according to the Times, the authorities released a statement saying, “…the police… administered stern warnings to both men for the offences of Section 3 of the Foreign National Emblems (Control of Display) Act and Section 16 of the Public Order Act,” and “both men will be banned from re-entering Singapore.” The BBC, meanwhile, quoted an official spokesman as saying Singapore’s police “take a serious view of acts which could potentially harm the racial and religious harmony in Singapore”.

This leaves me with mixed feelings. I believe people should be free to express their opinions, so long as that expression doesn’t cause innocent parties any harm, and I don’t see how two 60-something men holding a flag for a few seconds in a theatre full of Massive Attack fans could cause much harm. However, I also believe in the old adage, ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do’. Singaporeans are proud of the stable, prosperous, multicultural society they’ve created, in a region that, elsewhere, has often been troubled by ethnic and religious conflicts. For many people, having strict laws outlawing the display of foreign flags (and eliminating any possibility they could be used to stir up trouble) is a price worth paying. I didn’t see much sympathy for the band on local Internet discussion-forums, where the sentiment was largely, “Bloody foreigners, coming over here, breaking our laws.” “Good riddance to bad rubbish,” said one commentator, evidently not a fan.

It’s worth noting that the UK authorities have given Massive Attack a hard time too for their pro-Palestinian sympathies. 3D was arrested in Trafalgar Square in April this year for carrying a sign expressing support for the proscribed, allegedly terrorist group Palestine Action.

Anyway, this furore obscures the fact that the concert itself was exceptional.

Then on August 7^th, singer-songwriter David Byrne – one-time vocalist and guitarist with legendary American new-wave band Talking Heads – performed at the Star to promote his 2025 solo album Who is the Sky? This gig didn’t begin well for me. When I bought my ticket via Ticketmaster, I got an email warning me not to try to enter the venue using a screenshot of it. I should have the ticket open in my Ticketmaster account, on my phone, ready for security staff to scan its QR code. Just before I set off for the Star, I discovered the link in the email was taking me not to the David Byrne ticket in my account, but to the Massive Attack one from 10 days earlier. This kept happening on my phone only. When I clicked the link on my computer, I was taken to the correct ticket. Finally, exasperated, I took a screenshot of the Byrne one on my computer and sent it to my phone, as proof I’d at least bought the ticket.

When I explained the problem to the ladies at the Ticketmaster table outside the Theatre entrance, they told me to use the screenshot on my phone.

“But your instructions said…”

“Just use it!”

The security lady looked at me tetchily when I presented the screenshot, but she scanned its QR code and it was accepted. I was in.

I wasn’t only me suffering technical difficulties. The gig was scheduled to start at eight o’clock but nothing happened onstage for another half-hour – except for a few minutes when David Byrne himself walked into view. He explained that some glitches were delaying proceedings and, by way of apology, entertained us with some sightseeing photos he’d taken that day in Singapore. He did this with much enthusiasm. His photos appeared on big screens above him and included one taken at Singapore’s marvellous Haw Par Villa, where you can stroll through a giant diorama depicting the 10 Courts of Hell from Chinese and Buddhist mythology. That photo depicted sinners impaled bloodily on a ‘hill of knives’, which Byrne cheerfully informed us was the afterlife punishment awaiting people who charge too much interest on loans. You know, bankers.

Byrne came across as someone with genuine interest in the places he travelled to and his good humour was greatly engaging. I’d always thought he was decent, but after this episode I decided he was an absolutely top bloke.

During the delay I’d observed how the stage was empty. It contained no instruments or equipment. When the gig finally started, I understood why. After the opening number, a static rendition of the 1979 Talking Heads song Heaven, which Byrne sang accompanied by two musicians playing a violin and portable keyboard (while the earth rose majestically through space on the screens behind), the show really became a show – a dance one as well as a musical one.

For each song, Byrne and eleven blue-clad co-performers went through a set of choreographed moves. Six of the eleven were dancers and background singers. The other five were musicians, carrying their instruments with them – guitars and keyboards, drums such as a tom-tom, timbale, snare drum and marching bass drum, and, when the song required, a violin or saxophone. The musicians especially impressed me, keeping focused on where they were going as well as on what they were playing. Meanwhile, the screens conjured up various backdrops: American suburbia, a forest, a skyscape, psychedelic patterns, a disorientating video where the same performers followed the same moves they were currently doing onstage but wearing animal-heads.

It felt part Broadway musical, part cheerleader routine, part circus (with Byrne as the ringmaster), part parade by a marching band. Byrne even reminded me at times of Willy Wonka, orchestrating his co-performers like Oompa Loompas. (I have to say, though, that with his blonde hair and cheery demeanour, Byrne looked more like Peter Isherwell, the sinister, ultimately incompetent billionaire played by Mark Rylance in the 2021 end-of-the-world movie Don’t Look Up.) It’s also pretty astonishing how Byrne can do all this, seemingly effortlessly, at the age of 74.

With a plethora of drums, the music was percussion-heavy, which suited the catchy rhythms of Byrne’s solo songs perfectly. I wondered if his Talking Heads songs would come across as well, but they did. Several (including 1985’s And She Was) were performed during the first half of the set, before the focus switched to his solo stuff. Then, near the end, out came the biggest Talking Heads numbers: Psycho Killer (1977), Life During Wartime (1979), Once in a Lifetime (1981) and Burning Down the House (1983). Psycho Killer got the biggest reaction from the crowd, who inevitably chanted “Fa-fa-faa-fa-fa, fa-fa-faa-fa-fa!” in unison. But I think it’s Once in a Lifetime that’s my favourite in Byrne’s oeuvre. I remember first hearing it on Top of the Pops (1964-2006) when I was 16 and thinking it was bloody weird. A week later, when I heard it again, I was hooked.

Anyway, this was a wonderful concert too. Maybe not quite a once-in-a-lifetime experience, but not far off one.

January 24, 2025

Haw Par Villa: a special place in hell

Donald Trump has been inaugurated as 47^th President of the United States of America. With social-media platforms like X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads and now TikTok acting as his cheerleaders and fascists like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters and those deranged January 6^th rioters he’s just pardoned acting as his law enforcers, he looks set to transform the USA into a combination of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Ben Ali’s Tunisia and Benito Mussolini’s Italy. That’s while his administration abandons science and embraces paranoid conspiracy fantasies, superstition and stupidity, pumps umpteen more billions of tons of carbon into our already-poisoned biosphere, and conspires to destroy what democracies remain in the modern world. Therefore, it can be said we are now living in hell.

With these hellish things happening, I thought it would be appropriate to devote a blogpost to the most vivid representation of hell I have ever seen: that at Haw Par Villa, Singapore’s most remarkable museum.

Haw Par Villa was originally built by Burmese-Chinese brothers Aw Boon Haw and Aw Boon Par, who developed and marketed the famous analgesic remedy Tiger Balm. They relocated from Burma to Singapore in 1926 and purchased the site – today on the West Coast Highway, just along from the Haw Par Villa MRT Station – in 1935. The villa was designed in an Art Deco style and completed in 1937, but its original incarnation didn’t last long, being bombed and occupied by the Japanese during World War II and demolished after the war ended. Its gardens survived, though. Up to his death in 1954, Aw Boon Haw installed statues and dioramas there that he hoped would help instil ‘traditional Chinese values’ in those who viewed them. Subsequently, the gardens became a public park popular among Singaporean families.

By the 1980s, the place was losing its lustre and efforts to repackage it meant it underwent several name changes – from ‘Tiger Balm Gardens’ to ‘Haw Par Villa Dragon World’, back to ‘Tiger Balm Gardens’ and finally to ‘Haw Par Villa’ as it is today. No doubt the Singaporean Tourist Board understood it was special, thanks to those installations Aw Boon Haw had made to promote his vision. Yet it surely seemed too traditional, and too eccentric, to compete with the city-state’s more modern visitor attractions. A study in 2014 reported ‘low tourist interest’ in it and made the melancholy observation that it was ‘rather rundown and not very well maintained’. However, Journeys Pte Ltd acquired it in 2015 and closed it for a period at the start of the 2020s to make renovations. Since reopening, the latest version of Har Par Villa has won acclaim. In 2023, for instance, it was a finalist in the Singaporean Tourism Awards for Outstanding Attraction. Let’s hope its future is now secure.

A while back, accompanied by my partner and a couple of friends, I visited Har Par Villa. Approaching its entrance, we went past the place’s name in blood-red English letters and Chinese characters raised against a tableau of artificial rocks. Then we went through a traditional Chinese paifang with a prominently-displayed picture of a tiger – appropriately for the home of Tiger Balm – and then found ourselves passing a gamut of strange statues. These included big, spooky white rabbits with red mouths and eyes, mad-looking sheep with black horns and black-rimmed eyes, and a freaky humanoid pig in britches, cap and shirt, the shirt peeled back to reveal a fat belly and sagging man-boobs. A couple with human bodies and tiger heads, wearing dungarees and a pink dress, held forward tins, boxes and packets of Tiger Balm. And a pot-bellied Buddha with a wide cackling mouth resembled one of the Blue Meanies in the animated Beatles movie Yellow Submarine (1968). It was all wonderfully, charmingly weird.

Our intention today was to visit just one part of Haw Par Villa, its most famous part – the attraction announced by a banner at the entrance, which said: ‘Hell’s Museum: Visions of Death and the Afterlife’. From all accounts, there’s much more to see there, but that would have to wait until another visit.

After buying tickets at the ticket desk / gift shop – whose door had a sign saying ‘No food, no drinks, no pets (pets go to heaven)’ – we ventured into the first section of Hell’s Museum. We discovered a corner where we could stand by a backdrop of red-hot lava, orange flames and grey smoke and have photos taken so that it looked like we were in hell; and a room where a short documentary film about religious concepts of death and hell played on a loop. Thereafter, we entered a modern and reasonably sober museum. Haw Par Villa is famous for some over-the-top, properly hellish depictions of hell, but those would come later.

The museum contained displays and charts giving information on such things as different cultures’ and religions’ beliefs in the afterlife, the history of ‘handling death’ in Singapore, ‘Singapore’s industry of cremation’ and, courtesy of a large map, the locations of all the cemeteries in the city-state – Chinese, Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Baha’i, Parsi, Burmese, Japanese and ‘War’. Among many other things, there were verses on the subject of death and hell from various sacred texts, such as the Buddhist Dhammapada. (Chapter 9, Verses 126-128: “Some are born in the womb; the wicked are born in hell…”)

I particularly liked a replica of a Mexican Day of the Dead altar with all the traditional paraphernalia: photographs of the deceased, butterflies, flowers, bunting, candles, water, food, alcohol, cigars, salt, incense, mirrors, crosses and little skulls made of glass, ceramics, plaster and sugar. There was also one of ‘a traditional Chinese void deck funeral’. Void decks are the ground floors of the Singaporean Housing Development Board (HDB) apartment blocks that rise all over the city-state. These floors are normally untenanted and have communal spaces and, according to the museum, create ‘opportunities for residents to interact and bond over activities…’ and let them ‘…stage social functions, weddings, and of course funerals.’ Coincidentally, I’d lately read a short story entitled The Moral Support of Presence by the Singaporean writer Karen Kwek, about a woman having to organise and sit through a void-deck funeral for her mother whilst coping with grief.

Immediately past the modern museum was another area of Haw Par Villa eccentricity. The dioramas here included a mass of rock whose multiple folds and clefts were adorned with severed heads, their faces ghostly pale, tongues protruding, mouths and eyes leaking blood. An even more bizarre display was a rocky landscape where rats and rabbits were depicted at war with each other. I don’t know what story or legend inspired this, but to my Western eyes it resembled the title creatures of James Herbert’s The Rats (1974) taking on the rabbits in Richard Adams’ Watership Down (1972) – after those rabbits were infected with rabies. One rabbit chomping bloodily on a rat’s neck was an especially nasty detail. Meanwhile, I felt sorry for a pair of rats wearing medic armbands who were trying to carry away an injured comrade on a stretcher.

Finally we came to a structure housing Haw Par Villa’s most celebrated attraction – a series of dioramas representing the Ten Courts of Hell of Chinese mythology and Buddhism. Guarding its entrance were the demons Ox Head (a minotaur holding a trident) and Horse Face (an equine-headed being clutching a spiked club). These guardians, an information panel explained, were “…part of the netherworld’s bureaucracy. They form a network of attendants and jailers responsible for escorting souls through the ten courts…”

Inside, things started fairly innocuously with Court 1, where ‘King Qinguang conducts a preliminary trial for the deceased.’ The diorama here showed a recently-deceased soul cowering in front of King Qinguang while demon guards with superlong tongues and bird’s claws, or heads shaped like malformed gourds, looked on. Having been assessed according to the deeds they did alive, with the help of such judging tools as ‘the Book of Good and Evil’, ‘the Scale of Good and Evil’ and ‘the Mirror of Souls’, the souls are divided up: “Virtuous souls… may cross the Golden or Silver Bridges to either attain the Tao, become immortals or deities, or be reborn as humans blessed with good lives…”, whereas “…sinners will have to go through further judgement and punishment in the rest of the 10 courts.” Needless to say, it’s the ordeals of that latter group that gives this attraction its ghoulish zest.

Thereafter, we learnt what types of miscreants are dealt with in Courts 2-9 and what punishments are meted out to them. In Court 2, for instance, people who’ve caused hurt, cheated or robbed get ‘thrown into a volcanic pit’, those who’ve indulged in corruption, stealing or robbery (again) get ‘thrown into blocks of ice’, and those sullied by prostitution get ‘thrown into a pool of blood’. By Court 9, robbers, murderers, rapists and those responsible for ‘any other unlawful conduct’ have their ‘head and arms chopped off’ while anyone guilty of ‘neglecting the old and the young’ gets ‘crushed under boulders’.

And the dioramas showed the courts’ demonic bureaucrats carrying out those punishments in bloody, gory detail. We saw hearts being extracted (as punishment for ungratefulness, being disrespectful towards one’s elders or ‘escaping from prison’); writhing bodies disappearing under giant grindstones (that’s what you get if you’re disobedient to your siblings or don’t show enough ‘filial piety’); folk being graphically impaled on the branches of ‘a tree of knives’ (your comeuppance for cheating, kidnapping or using bad language); and tongues being removed (the price you pay if you spread rumours or cause discord among your family members).

Fabulously, the chopping, severing, gouging, crushing, impaling, disembowelling, dismembering and decapitating going on in Haw Par Villa’s 10 Courts of Hell have encouraged generations of parents to bring their children here in order to instil moral values in them – or, putting it more bluntly, to terrify them into being good. They’ve forced their offspring to look on these horrors while warning them, “See what happens if you’re naughty!” Indeed, one of my Singaporean colleagues told me she was brought here when she was eight years old and suffered nightmares for the next fortnight.

I found myself wondering, meanwhile, what chastisements the 47^th President of the USA would face when he passed away and entered the netherworld. From what I knew of his misdeeds, I calculated he’d be thrown into a volcanic pit, into blocks of ice, into a tree of knives and into a wok of boiling oil; have his heart and tongue cut out and his head and arms chopped off; and be grilled alive on a red-hot copper pillar, sawn in half and pounded by a stone mallet. Oh, and dismembered.

Lastly, in Court 10, we saw King Zhuanlun making a final judgement on the souls who’ve been through hell’s punishments, deciding “what forms they will take upon their rebirth. This will depend on their karma – the good and bad deeds committed in life.” In this diorama, there were two sinners on their hands and knees before the king, and already the animals they’d become in their next lives were taking form on their backs. One was metamorphosising into a black goat, the other into a white rabbit. Before being reincarnated as those creatures, they had one more port of call – ‘Meng Po’s Pavillion’, where their memories of previous lives, and presumably of hell, are erased.

With all this glorious, phantasmagorical barminess on display, it doesn’t surprise me that the Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka, who worked in Singapore at various times between 2014 and 2020 and whose Booker Prize-winning novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2022) is about ghosts, demons and the afterlife in late-1980s Colombo, cites Har Par Villa as one of Seven Moons’ major inspirations.

As I’ve said, there was a great deal more at Haw Par Villa we didn’t have time to see that day. I can’t wait for our next visit to this splendidly baroque place.

January 1, 2025January 24, 2025

My 2024 writing round-up

© The Sirens Call Publications

“Well, 2024 was an excellent year!” No future historians will say, ever. Come to think of it, because of events in 2024, there might not be any future historians. Not any future, full-stop.

However, on a personal level, 2024 saw some improvements in my situation. Firstly, in March, my partner and I, and our cat, moved apartments in our current city (and country) of abode, Singapore. We’d been in an expensive condo, inhabited mostly by rich Western and Chinese expatriates, in a modern part of the city-state. We moved into a cheaper and more modest condo in an older and more traditional district where our neighbours are nearly all Singaporean. It’s so much nicer. For one thing there are no spoilt, bratty kids running riot outside our front door because the unfortunate Filippino / Indonesian / Burmese girls hired by their expat parents as ‘maids’ or ‘helpers’ and made to look after them are afraid or unwilling to discipline them. Also, our new neighbourhood is handier for getting to our work and has several notable Hawkers’ Centres and eateries offering a range of good but modestly-priced foods. Singapore is generally expensive and its Hawkers’ Centres are one of its saving graces.

Secondly, I had a successful year with regard to my writing. Indeed, in terms of short stories published, 2024 even topped 2023, when 15 of my stories made it into my print. This has been my best writing year to date.

So, here’s a round-up of my stories published in 2024. Details are provided about who published them, what pseudonym they were published under and, when possible, how they can be accessed today.

As Jim Mountfield:

Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym I stick on my horror fiction, was first published in 2024 at the end of January when the story Underneath the Arches was included in the quarterly fiction-and-poetry magazine The Sirens Call. Heavily inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, Underneath the Arches was written by me at a young age – and I think it shows in the florid writing style. However, I was grateful to The Sirens Call for giving the story (which’d languished on my computer hard-drive for decades) a home at last. Alas, The Sirens Call ceased publication late in the year and I can no longer provide a link for downloading its past issues.
In April, Issue 11 of The Stygian Lepus featured my ‘cosmic-horror’ story The Followers, which was set in the English city I lived in from 2002 to 2005, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Specifically, it was set in two parts of it, Grainger Market and Chinatown on Stowell Street. Issue 11 can be read here if you become a member of The Stygian Lepus’s Back Catalogue; or purchased here.

© The Stygian Lepus

April was also when my Northern-Ireland-set short story The Crawler, which involved a devious policeman and a collection of sinister dolls, appeared in 2024’s second issue of The Sirens Call.
And in July the next – and unfortunately, the last ever – issue of The Sirens Call contained my sci-fi / horror story The Colony. This was set in East Anglia after manmade climate change has hoicked up temperatures and sea levels. Its premise was that scientists had created, through genetic engineering, millions of giant jellyfish-like organisms and tethered them offshore in order to hold back storm surges and reduce coastal erosion. Obviously, nothing could go wrong with this scheme. Nothing at all…
The Hole in the Wall was a ‘folk-horror’ story about a member of an organisation modelled on Britain’s Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) who’s researching a couple of pubs. First, he visits a horrible dump of a pub; then he stumbles across a pub that’s so classy it seems too good to be true. And yes, the second one is too good to be true because it has a mysterious, malevolent something lurking in its walls. The Hole in the Wall appeared in Volume 18, Issue 12 – the October 2024 edition – of Schlock! Webzine, which can be purchased here.
Also in October, my story The Activation was the opening number in the anthology Nightmare Fuel: Body Horror 2024, the annual volume of scary fiction published by Cloaked Press. As the collection’s title suggests, its theme this year was body horror, described by Wikipedia as “a subgenre of horror fiction that intentionally showcases grotesque or psychologically disturbing violations of the human body or of another creature…” including “aberrant sex, mutations, mutilation, zombification, gratuitous violence, disease, or unnatural movements of the body.” The Activation contained about five of those things, so I think it fitted the bill. It was also a prequel to my story The Nuclei, which appeared in the 2020 collection Xenobiology – Stranger Creatures. Nightmare Fuel: Body Horror 2024 can be purchased on Kindle here and as a paperback here.

© Cloaked Press

In November, a Jim Mountfield story appeared in the collection Monster: Underdog Anthology 2024 from Leg Iron Books. A monster of a book indeed, this featured 39 spooky stories, including my Halloween-set effort Bag of Tricks. The story was inspired by a memory I had of riding on Bangkok’s Skytrain one October 31^st when some Thai kids entered the carriage wearing fancy dress, presumably on their way to a Halloween party; but most of Bag of Tricks actually takes place in Scotland. Monster: Underdog Anthology 2024 can be bought on Kindle here and as a paperback here.
The Tears of the Pontianak, which appeared in the Samhain 2024 edition of the magazine The Hungur Chronicles, published in November too, was a first for me. This was my first published story where the setting is my current home, Singapore. As you can tell from the title, it’s mainly about a Pontianak, a blood-drinking demon of Malaysian, Singaporean and Indonesian folklore. But the idea for the story actually came to me one afternoon when I was exploring Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum and encountered some beautiful pieces of local, antique furniture. The Hungur Chronicles’ Samhain 2024 issue can be purchased directly from Hiraeth Publishing here or from Barnes & Noble here.
Coming from a farming background, quite a few of my stories are set on farms. However, I only had one ‘farm-horror’ story published in 2024. This was in Issue 19 – the December 2024 edition – of The Stygian Lepus and its title was Rack and Ruin. It owed something to the legendary American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, although the Lovecraftian elements were mixed with the mud, muck and rain of a hill farm in autumnal southern Scotland. Again, Issue 19 can be read here if you’re a member of The Stygian Lepus’s Back Catalogue; or simply bought here.
The influence of H.P. Lovecraft could also be seen in The House of Glass, the final Jim Mountfield story I had published in 2024. As its title implies, most of the action takes place inside a house made almost entirely of glass. The house stands in the mountains of Sri Lanka, the country where I lived in real life from 2014 to 2022. The House of Glass appears in the anthology Swan Song: The Final Anthology, which, sadly, is the last volume to come from Trevor Denyer’s Midnight Street Press – from now on, Midnight Street Press will exist only to sell what’s on its back catalogue, not to produce anything new. It can be purchased from Amazon UK here and from Amazon US here.

© Swords and Sorcery Magazine

As Rab Foster:

Rab Foster, the pseudonym I use when writing fantasy fiction – usually the unruly sub-genre of fantasy called ‘sword and sorcery’ – hit the ground running in 2024. On January 1^st, the second and final part of my story The Boots of the Cat appeared in Volume 18 Issue 3 of Schlock! Webzine. This was about a group of mercenaries who, while sequestered in an unwelcoming city, find themselves in a strange scenario inspired by a famous fairy tale. And no, despite the title, that fairy tale isn’t Puss in Boots. The issue can be purchased here.
Because of a publishing delay, the December 2023 edition of the fiction magazine Savage Realms Monthly didn’t appear until January 2024. It contained my story Pit of the Orybadak, which combined fantasy elements – slimy flesh-eating monsters slithering around in a giant bog – with the pertinent real-life theme of how soldiers are treated (or mistreated) when they become prisoners of war. This issue of Savage Realms Monthly can be bought here.
The Fleet of Lamvula, a heady story inspired by my love of ‘lost graveyards of ships’ stories, and the movies of Ray Harryhausen, and the trippiest song ever recorded, Black Sabbath’s Planet Caravan, appeared in late January in Issue 144 of Swords and Sorcery Magazine. The story can now be read in Swords and Sorcery Magazine’s archive, here.
In July, my Rab Foster story The Drakvur Challenge made it into the pages of Issue 3 of Crimson Quill Quarterly. This was a milestone for me, being (by my calculations) the 100^th short story I’ve had published. The Drakvur Challenge was inspired by a visit I made to Tirta Gangga Royal Water Garden in Bali, Indonesia – a place I found fascinating because of its beautiful ponds, fish, fountains and networks of stepping stones… while, stowed away in a compound at the back, it also had some surprisingly monstrous-looking statues. However, like much of my fantasy fiction, The Drakvur Challenge owed a big debt to the cinematic marvel that was Ray Harryhausen too. Issue 3 of Crimson Quill Quarterly can be obtained as a paperback here and on Kindle here.

© Crimson Quill Quarterly

August saw the appearance of my story The Scarecrow of Terryk Head in Issue 151 of Swords and Sorcery Magazine. In it, one of my recurring fantasy-fiction characters, Gudroon the Witch, had to deal with not only the evil scarecrow of the title but with three doltish farmers – and with three even-more-doltish farmers’ sons. Again, The Scarecrow of Terryk Head is now available to read in the magazine’s archive, here.
In November, Rab Foster strayed into the controversial sub-genre of fantasy known as ‘grimdark’ and served up a tale of violence and gore, nihilism and despair, entitled The Mechanisms of Raphar. (What, I wonder, inspired this? What event in the real world in November 2024 could have induced nihilism and despair in me?) Owing something to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum (1842) and also something to the ’10 Courts of Hell’ display at Singapore’s most remarkable museum, Haw Par Villa, The Mechanisms of Raphar appeared in Volume 18, Issue 13 of Schlock! Webzine, now purchasable at Amazon here.

© Schlock! Webzine

As Steve Cashel:

Steve Cashel, the penname I put on non-horrific, non-fantastical and often crime-tinged stories set in Scotland, had one piece published in 2024. In fact, it appeared only yesterday, on December 31^st, the final day of the year. It’s called Malkied and appears on the short-fiction page of the website for the crime-and-mystery publisher Close to the Bone. It’s accessible here.

And finally…

This is cheating. Self-publishing doesn’t count. But on September 18^th, 2024 – the tenth anniversary of Scotland’s referendum on independence – I took the opportunity to post on this blog a short story entitled Mither, which I’d written in 2014 soon after I’d heard the referendum’s result. A mixture of Scottish politics and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), it was too weird to ever get properly published. (Still, even if I say so myself, I think Norman Bates and his mom are a good metaphor for Scotland and the divisions between ‘yes’ and ‘no’ voters that supposedly materialised at the time.) Anyway, if you’re interested, you can read it here.

So, I had 17 short stories published in 2024, which makes it my most successful year as a writer ever. I suspect I will be hard-pressed to equal or better that record in 2025, however. That’s because of the recent disappearances of certain magazines (like The Sirens Call) and publishers (like Midnight Street Press) who have published my stuff regularly in the past.

Meanwhile, 2025 looks like it’s going to be garbage, largely due to Donald Trump regaining the American presidency, which will embolden fascists, climate-change deniers, anti-vaxxers and conspiracy-fantasist nutjobs around the world. I suspect even somewhere as famously stable as Singapore will be affected, negatively, by the USA turning into a mafia state / an oligarchy / the political equivalent of a meth lab. And there’ll be extra, unwelcome input from Elon Musk… Oh well. My strategy for surviving 2025 with my sanity intact will be to keep my head down and keep writing.

© The Sirens Call Publications

November 5, 2024December 4, 2024

Rab Foster gets grim

Rab Foster, my penname when I write fantasy fiction, has just had a new story published. It’s called The Mechanisms of Raphar and it appears in the November 2024 – Volume 18, Issue 13 – edition of Schlock! Webzine.

Once upon a time, I believed fantasy fiction came in two varieties only. One type consisted of 1000-page-long, telephone-directory-sized epics whose narratives involved quests, wizards, kings and queens, elves, hobbits and orcs and the first thing you saw when you opened the books was a lavishly detailed map of the fantasy-land in question. This J.R.R. Tolkien-esque variety was known as ‘high fantasy’. Alternatively, there were short stories where Conan the Barbarian, armed with only a broadsword and a leather jockstrap, cut a bloody swathe through enemy warriors, slew the occasional giant snake and earned himself the adoration of the occasional busty maiden. These were examples of the more down-and-dirty ‘sword and sorcery’ variety, of which Robert E. Howard was the leading practitioner.

But not anymore. Nowadays, if I type the question, “What are the different types of fantasy fiction?” into Google, it gives me 24 sub-genres. These include all sorts of nice, cheery-sounding things such as ‘hopepunk’ (“about characters fighting for positive change, radical kindness, and communal responses to challenges”), ‘romantasy’ (which are “typically set in fantastical worlds, with fairies, dragons, magic, but also feature classic romance plotlines – enemies-to-lovers, soulmates, love triangles”) and ‘cosy fantasy’ (“works that contain or portray a comforting healing ambience to the story… centre on slice of life moments… and are often gentle in their narratives”). A well-known example of that last sub-genre is Travis Baldree’s 2023 novel Legends & Lattes, in which an orc and a succubus join forces to… open a coffee shop. Now I’m not going to slag off Legends & Lattes because it’s wrong to diss a book I haven’t read. Let me merely say it doesn’t sound like my cup of tea. Or indeed, cup of coffee.

Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the niceness spectrum from hopepunk, romantasy and cosy fantasy is… grimdark. This is the nihilistic, blood-soaked, everyone’s-a-bastard variety of fantasy most famously essayed in George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones books (1996-2011) and TV series (2011-19). The science-fiction author Adam Roberts has described grimdark as fantasy stories where “nobody is honourable and might is right”, and which “turn their backs on the more uplifting Pre-Raphaelite visions of idealised medievaliana, and instead stress how nasty, brutish, short and, er, dark life back then really was.”

I’m not that big a fan of grimdark. I sometimes find its ‘everything sucks’ attitude rather adolescent. But The Mechanisms of Raphar is pretty grim, and pretty dark, so I guess it qualifies as a story of this type. I’ve experienced a few lows recently, especially in my professional life, and I can hardly say I’m enchanted with the state of the world in 2024, so perhaps the story is a manifestation of my current discontent.

The Mechanisms of Raphar was vaguely inspired by the Edgar Allan Poe story The Pit and the Pendulum. Unlike the famous 1961 movie version directed by Roger Corman, which was about Vincent Price mourning his dead wife in a castle that coincidentally happened to have a few torture instruments stowed in its cellar, Poe’s original tale is about a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition who tries to withstand the various devices of torture they use against him. In The Mechanisms of Raphar, the villains are an insane, sado-masochistic religious cult who worship a god of pain, have a giant temple that’s packed full of torture-machines, and make their services available – for a fee – to people who want other people to suffer horribly, such as despots and their prisoners or other religions and their heretics. I’m from Northern Ireland, so I don’t have a high opinion of organised religion. I think this shows in the story.

Incidentally, the name ‘Raphar’ is nearly an anagram of ‘Haw Par’, which is my tribute to Haw Par Villa, the most extraordinary museum in Singapore. Haw Par Villa’s most famous – or notorious – attraction is a graphic representation of the Ten Courts of Hell where you can see the souls of sinners being horrifically tortured and punished for the crimes they committed while they were alive. Indeed, the ‘Tree of Blades’ that features in the story is inspired by the ‘Tree of Knives’, festooned with bloodied bodies, on display in Haw Par Villa’s depiction of hell.

Until the end of November, The Mechanisms of Raphar can be read here, while you can access the contents page of Volume 18, Issue 13 of Schlock! Webzine here.

And now that I’ve hopefully worked that bloodlust out of my system, maybe I will write a cosy fantasy next… Maybe my next Rab Foster story will be one where a kelpie and a balrog join forces to open a tea-room in Goblin-land.

October 31, 2024December 4, 2024

Malaysian macabre 2: The Muse and Other Stories by Chua Kok Yee

More Halloween-inspired stuff…

The Muse and Other Stories is the second collection of Malaysian horror tales I’ve read recently. The other was My Lovely Skull and Other Skeletons by Tunku Halim, which I reviewed on this blog a few posts ago.

The Muse… is the work of Chua Kok Yee. Like Tunku Halim, he seems to have led a Jekyll-and-Hyde existence – turning into a horror writer after sunset and penning stories of gruesome terror, but during the sunlit hours doing the sort of respectable, wholesome job that your parents would boast about you doing at dinner parties with friends. In Halim’s case, he combined horror writing with being a legal expert who practised corporate and conveyancing law. In Chua’s case (if I’ve located the correct person on social media), the non-horror world knows him as an accountant and ‘Adjunct Professor at University Putra Malaysia’, with ‘a history of working in the food and beverage and consumer goods industry’. Which shows you should never judge by appearances.

There are eight stories in The Muse… It starts strongly with the title tale, a cynical take on the idea that there are beautiful (inevitably female) muses whose only function is to channel inspiration towards great (inevitably male) artists. In reality, this has often been a case of women who were talented artists in their own right having their work ignored and being used, abused and eventually abandoned by those supposedly drawing inspiration from them. See, for example, Camille Claude, muse to Augustin Rodin, an artist herself, who ended up spending 30 years in an asylum; or Dora Maar, muse to Pablo Picasso, a photographer, who ended up needing psychiatric treatment and afterwards took solace in religion.

In Chua’s story, an up-and-coming novelist, and married man, called Mark Lee Wing Sen has an adulterous relationship with a younger woman called Leanne, which seemingly causes a new fervour and intensity in his writing: “…Leanne’s voice kept echoing in my head. The characters, plot and structure of the story flowed into my mind as if it was demanding to be told… I was almost like a new person after Leanne and I started our affair. Throughout the years, she inspired me more than anyone or anything else in the world… Her fingerprints are all over my books. She was my muse; a flowing river of inspiration that provided sustenance to this storytelling.” However, their relationship turns sour and worse, leading to causing obsession, murder and madness. And it doesn’t stop there. The ‘river of inspiration’ continues to flow into Mark from Leanne, but the writing she induces in him now is deadly in nature.

Rather brilliantly, the story’s two heroes – Mark’s agent Arun and a physician called Dr Leong whom he summons when he discovers Mark in shockingly poor health – cite the works of Stephen King when they realise they’re up against a supernatural foe and find themselves speculating on matters of good and evil. In particular, they discuss Father Callahan, the weak-willed priest in Salem’s Lot (1975), who’s unable to stand up to the chief vampire despite being armed with a cross. This is because his faith isn’t strong enough, which renders the cross useless: “At that moment, the cross lost its power and the vampire won.”

Elsewhere, two stories have scenarios where a pair of characters who knew each other as children meet up years later – and with their unexpected reunions come unsettling twists. In Remember, it’s a boy, Ah Hong, who’s suddenly contacted by his long-lost sister, Yee Ching. In Under the Mask, a young girl called Anna encounters a young man called Jiang whom she recalls was an orphan from a charitable institution sent to live in her household for a time. The institution had a programme whereby its orphans were temporarily given ‘a chance to be part of a natural home.’ Remember’s twist is slightly predictable, but the one in Under the Mask is shocking and upsetting.

Several stories showcase Chua’s sense of humour. Sword of Angel amusingly combines a gritty Malaysian crime drama with a fantasy story in the manner of the classic Michael Powell-Emeric Pressburger movie A Matter of Life and Death. Admittedly, this is a pretty warped variation on A Matter of Life and Death. An incompetent gangster gets himself killed whilst on his way to rub out an informer, but then is raised from the dead by a mysterious shapeshifting angel known simply as ‘Mike’. The angel wants him to carry out a different assassination – that of a seemingly innocuous kid called Calvin, who needs to be terminated because “the angel in charge of his Fortune Scale screwed up” and made him supernaturally and harmfully lucky: “He’s not merely ‘lucky’. He is an abomination! You know, luck is not infinite. It comes from a pool, and every time this Calvin drinks from it, someone else is deprived of their rightful share. And I’m telling you, he is guzzling it down. I have to put a stop to it.”

The gangster is less than happy to find himself back in the world of the living in a zombie-like state, bearing the scars of a recent autopsy: “…my body was festooned with stitches. They looked like huge, black centipedes on my arms and thighs. The worst was the huge Y-shaped incision that ran down my torso.” Later, he’s also displeased to learn that he’s not the only dead gangster Mike has reanimated in order to take out Calvin. The story is enjoyable largely because of its hapless and grumbling protagonist and it’s gratifying when he finally figures out a way to turn the tables on the devious Mike.

Similarly, Duke of Zhi has supernatural forces making an intervention in the world of the living and compelling an unfortunate mortal to do their bidding. The reason this time is more mundane. The denizens of hell, led by the narrator’s deceased mother, are concerned about the Loh family, who ‘run the Chinese funeral paraphernalia shop called Loh Paper Enterprise’ and are ‘the best funeral paraphernalia shop in Kuala Lumpur.’ The highlights of their ‘funeral paraphernalia’ are their lavishly detailed paper mansions that, according to Chinese custom, are burnt at funerals in the belief they’ll be passed on to the deceased in the afterlife, where those dead souls can live inside them in comfort.

The narrator gets a glimpse of the paper mansion he purchased from the Lohs for his mother, which now accommodates her in hell: “I was inside a huge hall, filled with exquisite-looking furniture. The chairs were carved from wood, painted in gold and decorated with intricate carvings… A crystal chandelier hung majestically high above, while every inch of the walls was adorned with abstract motifs of animals. Yes, it was the most elegant room I had ever been in…. ‘Hey! I know this place!’ I exclaimed, and jumped to my feet.”

It transpires that the young man set to inherit the Loh family’s business, despite having ‘talent that could rival his grandfather,’ isn’t interested in taking it on. “He doesn’t know his importance to us here in the afterlife, because he’s a non-believer… Despite his gift, he prefers to run a hipster coffee shop instead… Millions of souls would be forced to stay in substandard mansions…” The bewildered narrator is tasked with convincing Loh Junior to abandon the coffee shop, keep the family business going, and keep providing the spirits of the dead with opulent housing. It’s a task that, predictably, he bungles.

Duke of Zhi is amusing with its depiction, in these Trumpian times, of an afterlife whose inhabitants of are just as obsessed with real estate as living souls are. It also touches on a rather sad fact in the real world, which is the art of the “traditional Chinese paper house crafters… is quickly dying as an increasing number of people seek alternative ways to honour their deceased relatives.”

I also like the story because it features the demon Horse-Face, one of the guardians of hell in Chinese mythology. You can see a human-sized effigy of him at Haw Par Villa, the most fascinating museum in Singapore. There, he stands at the entrance of the Villa’s most famous (or infamous) attraction, a graphic representation of the Ten Courts of Hell. I wanted to write something about Haw Par Villa on this blog during the run-up to Halloween 2024, but couldn’t find the time. I will soon, though.

Also touching on local folklore are the stories Akuan, which draws on legends of the harimau akuan, that is, ‘were-tiger, were-leopard or were-panther’, and Feed the Boy, which features a toyol. A toyol, the latter story’s protagonist hears from a mysterious antiques dealer, is “the soul of an unborn baby possessed by a djinn. By nature, a djinn is wild and fiery. It’s the baby’s soul that tempers its more dangerous side, turning it tame and obedient. The soul will be weakened if it’s not fed by the blood of its master. When that happens, the wild nature of the djinn would take over.” But fed by blood, and kept ‘tame and obedient’, a toyal scuttles off to commit crimes on its master’s behalf. It uses its diminutive size to enter other people’s homes, rob them and bring back their valuables.

This suits the protagonist of Feed the Boy, Edry, a hard-up food-delivery man “feeling envious of old school friends who were driving new Japanese cars, while he could only afford a motorcycle. He felt like a loser whenever he delivered food to beautiful houses and condominiums, because their bathrooms alone were more spacious than his rented room.” Edry’s fortunes take an upswing when he acquires a toyol – which disconcertingly has a name, Aamir. He grows rich thanks to Aamir’s ‘nightly heists’ and feeding it with his blood, which it extracts from his toes, seems a small price to pay.

He becomes less keen on the creature when, a few years later, he gets married and his wife becomes pregnant. It’s then that he learns how “sometimes a toyol can become excited by the presence of another child in the household.” What follows, chronicling Edry’s attempts – inevitably doomed attempts, because this is a horror story – to get rid of Aamer, makes this for me the best tale in the book.

With its mixture of the up-to-date and the traditional, and the gruesome and the funny, and with its references to both Malaysian and Western culture, I found The Muse and Other Stories a solidly entertaining read. So, I recommend you to purchase a copy of it and enjoy the products of Chua Kok Yee’s fertile imagination.

Alternatively, of course, you could send your tame toyol crawling into your nearest bookshop, library or Amazon book-warehouse after business hours and procure a copy that way…

From linkedin.com