J-Horror – Blood and Porridge

October 21, 2024October 22, 2024

Malaysian macabre 1: My Lovely Skull and Other Skeletons by Tunku Halim

© Penguin Books

Here’s another entry for the run-up to Halloween…

The horror stories in Malaysian writer Tunku Halim’s collection My Lovely Skull and Other Skeletons (2022) don’t hint at what, for much of his life, he’s done as a career.

In fact, Halim qualified as a barrister in England and then practised corporate and conveyancing law in Malaysia and Australia. That’s why his Wikipedia bibliography contains not only such titles as Dark Demon Rising (1997), Blood Haze: 15 Chilling Tales (1999) and Gravedigger’s Kiss (2007), but also Everything the Condominium Developer Should Have Told You But Didn’t (1992) and Condominiums: Purchase Investment & Habitat (1996). Also, he’s published children’s fiction, children’s encyclopedias, books on losing weight and books on playing golf. Though Halim has been described as ‘Asia’s Stephen King’, I don’t believe Maine’s word-slinging ‘Master of Pop Dread’ has ever got around to penning tomes on watching your waistline or improving your handicap on the golf course.

Similar variety is found among the 15 tales in My Lovely Skull. They range in tone from the highbrow and elegiac to the unashamedly hokey. In the latter category is Karaoke Nightmare, in which a woman with a love for performing Mariah Carey but a hopeless singing voice – personally, I find Ms. Carey’s output hideous whether it’s sung in tune or not – finds some weird singing lessons on YouTube. She falls under the spell of the singing teacher, known simply as ‘Air’, who has ‘intense, mysterious, coal-black eyes’ and ‘looks a bit like Jin from BTS except that his hair is greasy black’, and who addresses her directly from her TV screen. Air ensures that her next get-together with her friends in a karaoke box is, literally, murder.

Also amusingly schlocky is The Festival, in which some dog-lovers take umbrage at an event they see advertised as a ‘dog eating festival’ and turn up at it to protest. They discover, to their horror, that they’ve misunderstood the event’s semantics. What’s being eaten, and what’s doing the eating, are not what they think. I read somewhere that Halim is scared of dogs, a fear that no doubt inspired this tale.

More serious are his stories of psychological horror. In the tale that lends the book its name, My Lovely Skull, the narrator describes his descent into madness after finding a human skull on a beach. It isn’t long before he believes the skull – a female one – is speaking to him, crooning sweet but creepy words of seduction at him one minute, exhorting him to commit murder the next. Meanwhile, Cathedraphobia contains another descent into madness, and more murder, as the phobia of the story’s title gets the better of its main character. Cathedraphobia isn’t a fear of cathedrals, as you might expect, but a fear of chairs. Chairs have featured occasionally in macabre fiction – electric chairs, obviously, and haunted rocking chairs that move by themselves, and there’s Edogawa Rampo’s brilliantly morbid The Human Chair (1925) – but this is the first story I’ve come across involving someone being irrationally afraid of them.

I prefer, though, the collection’s stories that seem inspired by Halim’s local folklore. Waiting for You features a woman walking her dog whilst trying to forget the horribleness of her domestic situation – she’s married to a drunken, abusive husband – who stumbles across a grove of banana trees growing by a wall on the edge of some jungle. There, she unwittingly provokes a terrifying demon that resides among the trees: “…wearing a white smock, squatting, back propped against the wall. The face was hidden by long black hair that draped like curtains to the ground and merged with the mocking pools of blackness.” Although this fearsome entity is referred to only as the ‘demon’, I assume from its description, and the fact it’s found living among banana trees, and the fact it’s accompanied by a foul stench, that it’s a pontianak, “a mythical creature in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore… often depicted as a long-haired woman dressed in white.”

Also unidentified is the monstrous baby in Dream Baby. It’s found by a couple, ironically a childless couple who’ve tried IVF treatment in their desperate attempts to have offspring, after their car breaks down in the middle of the jungle. This time, I assume the beastly wee creature, the back of whose head is ‘a sickly grey’ and who has ‘several ugly bumps like tumours’ protruding from its spine, is inspired by another being from Malaysian and Indonesia folklore, the toyol. But while the normal toyol scuttles around and commits crimes on behalf of anyone who manages to tame it, talking advantage of its small size to break into other people’s homes, rob them and bring back their riches, the infant creature in Halam’s story just wants to drink blood… and kill.

Incidentally, there’s a pleasing riff on a more recent type of folklore, the urban myth, in The Elevator Game. The hero of this story is a social-media influencer who decides for his latest video to test the claim that by pressing a certain sequence of numbers in a lift – ‘G-3-1-5-1-9-4-G’ – you’ll eventually make the lift-doors open onto the afterlife and its ghostly inhabitants. This game is said to originate in ‘Korea or Japan’ and, appropriately, the story’s uneasy atmosphere resembles that of one of the numerous Japanese horror (‘J-Horror’) movies based on modern legends.

For me, My Lovely Skull’s best two stories come at the end. Moongate is set on the hillwalking trail of the same name on Malaysia’s Penang Island and features a couple who, whilst hiking there, have some disturbing experiences with a recurring, and rapidly aging, figure dressed in yellow. Their increasing panic leads to an accident – and one of them disappearing. The other member of the couple is left trying to figure out what happened. A story that impressively combines the sinister, the disorientating and the tragic, Moongate benefits from being set near the end of the Covid-19 pandemic. The grief depicted here, at the unexpected and bewildering loss of a loved one, echoes how many felt during the pandemic when family members and friends were snatched away by a virus that suddenly seemed to arrive from nowhere.

Equally good is the ultimate story, Water Flows Deepest, where perhaps there is a suggestion of Halim’s legal background and his expertise with condominiums. It’s set in a globally-warmed future where rising sea-levels inundate the world’s coasts, especially at high-tide. The story’s characters are a handful of people still stubbornly living in “a drab grey tower that stood high up against the ashen sky. It was once touted as a luxury seafront condominium but now it was a towering island citadel under constant siege… The guard house, its walls water-stained, stood empty…” Its driveway “was littered by sea debris which scattered up past the small roundabout to the lobby and then down to the basement parking. The parking entrance was dark like an open mouth and completely flooded.”

If this dystopian vision of future condo-living calls to mind, say, the works of J.G. Ballard, the story also contains a strong element of Stephen King. The characters have heard disturbing rumours of a deadly amorphous creature, ‘like a black curtain or an oil slick’, lurking in the steadily-rising, steadily-advancing seawater. This calls to mind King’s short story The Raft, which appeared in his 1985 collection Skeleton Crew and was adapted as the middle instalment in the three-story anthology movie Creepshow 2 (1987). I found the ending of Water Flows Deepest a little over-the-top, but the build-up to it is impressively, and wetly, ominous.

My Lovely Skull and Other Skeletons, then, is nicely varied in tone and content, and if a few tales are plainly not to be taken seriously, they have the saving grace of being good fun. The collection is also visceral. The horrors populating Halim’s short fiction are indiscriminate and though bad people meet gruesome ends, so too do morally neutral and decent ones.

Finally, Halim writes in a brisk, crisp and to-the-point style that looks easy to reproduce and makes the art of short-story writing look easy to do. That he makes them look so is a testament to his skill because both things aren’t easy. (I know this as a short-story writer myself.) Also, five of the 15 stories here are written in the present tense, a stylistic affectation I often find intrusive and annoying, but Halim carries it off so well that I didn’t even notice while I was reading them.

From tunuhalim.wordpress.com

October 31, 2023November 13, 2023

10 scary pictures for Halloween 2023

From pixabay.com / © socialneuron

It’s Halloween today. In keeping with tradition on this blog, I’ll celebrate the occasion by displaying ten pieces of macabre, spooky or unsettling artwork that I’ve come across and liked during the past year.

To start on a musical note… Here’s a flutist painted by the late Polish artist Zdzislaw Beksinski, whose work suggested Hieronymus Bosch combined with H.R. Giger and frequently depicted apocalyptic hellscapes populated by wraith-like figures. By Beksinski’s standards, this is a fairly sedate and playful piece. Its ochre-bathed figure is characteristically skeletal, but what impresses is how its multiple fingers, knuckles, joints, bones and tendons fuse chaotically to the flute and become a grotesque mechanism that’s an extension of it.

Beksinski met a tragic end in 2005 – after a traumatic few years during which he’d seen the death of his wife and the suicide of his son, he was murdered in a dispute over a small sum of money. Still, interest in his art has burgeoned since his death and there’s now a host of stuff about him on YouTube.

© Zdzislaw Beksinski

Moving eastwards from Poland to Ukraine – yes, a place that’s suffered plenty of real-life horror in the past two years. Yuri Hill is a Kiev-based artist who specialises in digital painting and whose work often depicts things worryingly pagan and primordial lurking in the forest. This piece is particularly good. As you study its crepuscular grey-blue murk, more and more details filter into view – not just the drooping, feathery branches of towering conifers, but the strange, bestial furriness of the figures and the Herne-the-Hunter-like antlers sprouting from their heads. The fact that they’re moving about on stilts just adds to the strangeness. For those of you wanting to see more of his work, Hill’s Instagram account is accessible here and his page on artstation.com here.

© Yuri Hill

From folk-horror to J-horror, i.e., Japanese horror, whose psychological, supernatural and urban-myth-derived traditions clearly inform this painting. Entitled Red Laugh, it’s the work of Yuko Tatsushima, who’s been described as both a ‘rockstar’ and an ‘outsider’ in Japanese painting. Even before we get to the grotesque subject matter, with the face missing an eyeball and some prominent, autopsy-like stitches running up its throat, the scratchy paint-strokes almost make you wonder if the artist did it with broken, bloody fingernails.

Indeed, the composition has a howl of rage about it that’s common in Tatsushima’s work. It frequently addresses sexual oppression, harassment and assault, things Japanese society – all societies, for that matter – often tries to look away from and things the artist has been a victim of herself. Such is the Francis Bacon-style intensity of Tatsushima’s creations that this YouTube film about her comes with a warning that its images might be ‘too disturbing for more sensitive viewers’.

© Yuko Tatsushima / From sugoii-Japan.com

That seems far, far removed from my next picture, which celebrates the cosy tradition of classical British horror fiction, set in wooden-panelled Victorian and Edwardian drawing rooms and populated by crusty, tweedy gentlemen. It’s by Charles W. Stewart, one of the few people who can claim to have been born in the Philippines but brought up in Galloway in Scotland, and whose enthusiasm for illustrating was apparently matched for his enthusiasm for ballet and costume design. Stewart, clearly a man of many interests, selected the stories and did the illustrations for a 1997 collection entitled Ghost Stories, and Other Horrid Tales, which was published four years before his death. The volume includes fiction by Sheridan Le Fanu, Robert Louis Stevenson, Lafcadio Hearn, Vernon Lee, M.R. James and Walter de la Mare.

Stewart’s illustration here, which shows an antiquarian discovering he has unexpected company whilst engaged in some nocturnal research, is presumably for M.R. James’s Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book. The story ends with the fictional equivalent of a cinematic jump-scare: “…his attention was caught by an object lying on the red cloth just by his left elbow… Pale, dusky skin, covering nothing but bones and tendons of appalling strength; coarse black hairs, longer than ever grew on a human hand; nails rising from the ends of the fingers and curving sharply down, grey, horny and wrinkled…”

© Folio Society

One of the greatest early scares in film history occurred in the 1925 silent version of Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera, which starred the remarkable Lon Chaney Sr in the title role. The mysterious masked phantom gets unmasked whilst playing at his beloved organ. Unable to stop herself, the singer Christine (Mary Philbin) whips the mask off from behind. The audience is confronted by the phantom’s horribly gaunt, stretched and skull-like face in the screen’s foreground – at this point, supposedly, some 1925 audience-members fainted. Then he turns around and the audience is traumatised a second time as they see Christine reacting in horror to his deformed visage too. Anyway, here’s a regal portrait of Chaney Sr’s Phantom of the Opera, sans mask, courtesy of Pittsburgh artist Daniel R. Horne, who’s painted a number of classic movie monsters.

© Daniel R. Horne

There were scares a-plenty in the films of director Alfred Hitchcock. Indeed, he was perhaps cinema’s greatest practitioner in the genres of suspense and horror. So popular was Hitchcock among the public in his heyday that he licensed his name to dozens of collections of crime, mystery, thriller, espionage and horror short stories, whose titles ranged from Alfred Hitchcock’s Coffin Break (1974) to Alfred Hitchcock’s Hard Day at the Scaffold (1967), from Alfred Hitchcock’s Monster Museum (1965) to Alfred Hitchcock’s Sinister Spies (1966). These had introductions purporting to be written by the great man himself, but they were actually penned by publishing-house editors.

I’m partial to this cover illustration from the collection Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbinders in Suspense (1967), which includes Daphne du Maurier’s short story The Birds (alongside the likes of Richard Connell’s The Most Dangerous Game, Roald Dahl’s Man from the South and Robert Bloch’s Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper). Hitchcock, of course, filmed The Birds in 1963. The cover’s artist isn’t identified, but with those brutally-pecky gulls, and the victim’s screaming face, he or she does a good job of capturing the directness of du Maurier’s grim, claustrophobic original. Hitchcock’s treatment of it is more mannered and expansive, though still brilliant.

© Lions, London

While many modern artists have taken their inspiration from the cinema, the American painter and illustrator Burt Shonberg could boast that his work turned up in movies. Most notably, Shonberg provided the disturbingly dark-eyed and corpse-faced portraits of former members of the Usher family, which Roderick Usher (Vincent Price) shows to Philip Winthrop (Mark Damon) in Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptation House of Usher (1960).

Acclaimed as ‘the premier psychedelic artist of Los Angeles’ from the 1950s until his death in 1977, Shonberg’s work extended beyond hippy-era psychedelia and he flirted with cubism and did some fine pen-and-ink drawings. Here, however, I’m showing a languid, sultry composition entitled Magical Landscape or Lucifer in the Garden, which depicts an unsettlingly youthful version of Auld Nick. Obviously, representations of the Devil abound throughout the history of art, but what makes this one memorable are those particularly long pasterns and the strange little sphinx resting on his lap.

From cvltnation.com

In these art-themed Halloween posts, I also like to honour the festival that comes straight after Halloween – Mexico’s Dia de Muertos, the Day of the Dead, at the start of November, which features skulls and skeletons as a major theme. This next picture gets straight to the point. It’s by David Lozeau, a San Diego artist who’s dedicated much of his career to creating Day of the Dead-inspired artwork, and it shows two skeletons raucously celebrating… Day of the Dead. I assume that yellow stuff in the señorita skeleton’s bottle is reposado tequila, which acquires its colour from the oak barrels it matures in.

© David Lozeau

There’s also an admirable directness about this picture, of a vampire lady, by Argentinian artist Hector Garrido, who passed away in 2020 when he was in his nineties. Put Garrido’s name into Google Images and you’ll be assailed by countless pictures of G.I. Joe toy-packaging, which he designed back in the 1980s. However, his main work was creating book covers, most popularly for gothic and romantic novels and for the series about the wholesome juvenile sleuths Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. But Garrido’s CV includes covers for the likes of John Brunner, Ramsey Campbell, Agatha Christie, John Christopher, Robert A. Heinlein, Richard Matheson and Robert Silverberg too.

This one comes from a book called A Walk with the Beast, actually a collection of ‘vintage tales of human monsters and were-beasts’ edited by Charles M. Walker. The stories include one by Vernon Lee, who also appeared in Charles W. Stewart’s Ghost Stories, and Other Horrid Tales. ‘All fun’ says the book’s single reviewer on amazon.com, so evidently it ‘does what it says on the tin’.

© Avon Books

And finally, for my final picture, it’s back to Japan for something similarly fun and schlocky – not the cover of a book but one of a Japanese comic-book. This effort by the late manga-artist Marina Shirakawa is wonderfully sinewy and eye-catching. It’s full of typical manga-style details – see those simultaneously hideous and gleeful ghouls in the background – and peculiarly Japanese ones, such as the heroine’s sailor-suit school uniform. Its colour scheme of dark, blue-grey hues, with smudges of blood-red at the back, is memorable too.

© From monsterbrains.blogspot.com

And that’s it for another year. Happy Halloween…

October 26, 2022November 1, 2022

Your last chance to see Jim Mountfield at Horrified

Some sad news I’ve heard recently is that Horrified Magazine, the ‘British horror website’, is closing down. Dedicated to media – films, television, plays, novels, short stories, comic books, etc. – involving the macabre and produced in the United Kingdom, Horrified has been a prime source of entertaining reading and valuable information during the past few years. A newly-appeared message on its main page informs readers that “From late October 2022, this website will no longer be updated with new content. Feel free to browse until such a time as the website is taken down.”

Horrified contains a short-story section, in which I’ve had two items published under the pseudonym Jim Mountfield, the name I put on my scary fiction. Both of these should still be accessible until the plug is finally pulled on the site. Therefore, this is your last chance (at least for a while) to read the following…

Published in 2020, Don’t Hook Now is a story set in the near-future where advances in technology, especially in the field of virtual reality, make it possible for people to take part in scenes from movies – the technology simulates the scenes, interactively, around them. For bona fide film fans, this would be magical. Imagine being on that rooftop near the end of Blade Runner (1982), beside Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) when he delivers his heart-breaking ‘tears in rain’ monologue, or being at the airport for the climax of Casablanca (1942), when Rick (Humphrey Bogart) says goodbye to Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman). However, human nature being what it is, I suspect such wondrous technology would end up being used for trivial, if not sordid, purposes. Thus, Don’t Hook Now features an app that allows people to take part in simulations of sex scenes from certain movies, and is used by lowlifes, sociopaths and perverts in pursuit of their thrills.

Don’t Hook Now’s subject matter was such that Horrified decided to give it a trigger warning and recommend it only for ‘mature audiences’. In my opinion, though, the main reason for recommending it to mature readers was because only people of a certain age would be familiar with the masterly 1970s British horror movie that gives the story its grim twist later on.

From 2021, meanwhile, is Where the Little Boy Drowned, which belongs to a sub-genre I like to think of as ‘constant jeopardy’. This is where the main character or characters spend the whole story, or most of it, trapped in a dangerous situation where the odds are stacked against them getting out of it alive. I won’t give too much away about Where the Little Boy Drowned, other than to say that its plot includes include a length of rope and a flooded river. There’s also a supernatural element to it, with a faint nod to Japanese horror films – J-Horror – and particularly to Takashi Shimizu’s 2002 chiller Ju-On: The Grudge.

So, for a little while longer, Don’t Hook Now can be accessed here, and Where the Little Boy Drowned here.

And thank you to the staff at Horrified for all their hard work these last few years.

January 21, 2021

Hanging around with Jim Mountfield

I’ve just had my first short story published in 2021. Where the Little Boy Drowned, which is attributed to Jim Mountfield, the pen-name I put on my horror fiction, is now featured in the ‘Stories’ section of the online magazine Horrified.

The story belongs to a sub-genre that I like to think of as ‘constant jeopardy’. The main character or characters spend the whole story, or most of it, stuck in a dangerous situation where the odds look stacked against them getting out of it alive.

Examples of constant-jeopardy stories include Jack Finney’s Contents of a Dead Man’s Pockets (1956) and Stephen King’s The Ledge (1976), both of which have their protagonist trapped on a narrow ledge high up the side of a towering apartment building. Two other examples are stories I’ve read by the Spanish writer Vincente Blasco Ibáñez and by Winston Churchill (who very occasionally wrote fiction when he wasn’t politicking) that are both called Man Overboard. As their shared title suggests, these are about someone falling off a fast-moving ship, into the middle of the ocean, without anyone else noticing that they’ve fallen off.

However, the most gruelling constant-jeopardy story I’ve come across is The Viaduct, written by Brian Lumley and first published in 1976. It’s about two boys who, for a dare, decide to cross the titular viaduct not by going along the top of it but going along underneath it – using 160 rungs, which for some reason the structure’s builders have installed there, as monkey-bars. The viaduct straddles a very deep valley and you can predict that this isn’t going to end well.

I don’t want to give too much away about Where the Little Boy Drowned, but one of its key plot elements is a length of rope. There’s also a supernatural element to it, with a faint nod to Japanese horror films – J-Horror – and particularly to Takashi Shimizu’s 2002 chiller Ju-On: The Grudge.

Where the Little Boy Drowned can be read here, while this link will take you to Horrified’s main page.