Tag: Pontianaks

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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 

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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.