Review: Books of Asian horror: Silk and Sinew, Insect Hag and Other Stories, and Zhiguai

 

I have been drawn to horror literature of late, not despite but because of some dark experiences. I am reminded of how horror in fiction can offer catharsis, a way of processing real-life pain and fear. Of how darkness in art can be a comfort—a friendly tap on the shoulder, a shared moment, a missive that arrives to say, You’re not alone.

 

Here are a few horror books I’ve read this summer, filled with strange tales to both unsettle and comfort, reminders that none of us are alone—not truly alone—in the dark.

 

Silk & Sinew: A Collection of Folk Horror from the Asian Diaspora

In Silk and Sinew, editor Kristy Park Kulski has gathered together 20 beautiful stories of darkness. The authors and poets (yes, there’s some poetry here as well) represent voices from a range of backgrounds and cultures, including China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Korea, India, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Armenia, and Lao. Ghosts, shamans, fox spirits, sleep paralysis demons, and other unquiet spirits haunt these pages. But just as vivid are the ghosts of history, of trauma, of family secrets and pain that’s unspoken but passed down generations.

 

Familial bonds—both the love and pain in these bonds—are at the heart of most of these stories. In Audrey Zhou’s opening story, “Mother’s Mother’s Daughter,” a witch cuts off pieces of her body to give birth to her daughters. . . and must continue to sacrifice body parts for her family’s continued survival. In other stories, it is children who must sacrifice (or who are expected to sacrifice) themselves for their family’s good. In Ai Jiang’s moving and painfully gorgeous, “The Heaven That Tastes Like Hell,” a small family heaps all its hopes and expectations on the shoulders of their only son. He is given special privileges—as much food to eat as he wishes, an exemption from the manual labor his sisters perform—but at a heavy cost. If he can’t fulfill his family’s hopes as they expect, there’s a heart-rending price to pay. . . “Hair,” by Saheli Khastagir, similarly takes on the theme of familial sacrifice: a girl is not allowed to cut her long, heavy hair—no matter how much pain its increasing weight gives her—because her family’s fortunes are all bound up in her hair. There’s a delicate, fable-like quality to this story: the girl eventually rebels, and her daughter tells the tale with a certain lightness of tone. There’s darkness here, and revenge, but there’s also light and joy and empowerment and even reconciliation and love amid the hurt and revenge. A particularly lovely, layered story, and one of my favorites in this collection.

 

Other stories focus on the weight of history and family secrets. “Squatters” is an absolute stunner of story, a darkly powerful tale in which an archaeologist goes to Taiwan to help excavate the site of an old political massacre. While there, she seeks out the country house her grandparents once owned, and political and family history begin to darkly converge. . .  “Fed by Earth, Slaked by Salt,” by Jess Cho is also about family secrets, although focused more tightly on personal history. After a long estrangement from family, the narrator returns to the family home for their mother’s funeral, to a place where the river meets the sea. There, while dealing with grief, the narrator begins to slowly understand the secrets of the marshland. . . This is an achingly gorgeous story, one that deals with multiple levels of loss. Woven through it is the grief, not just of the narrator, but of the narrator’s parents: the ache of immigration and displacement, of trying to make a new home, of trying to plant life in unfamiliar soil, runs throughout the tale. The way that Cho handles multiple thematic threads, and brings them all together in the end, is a marvel.

 

Diaspora themes of immigration and displacement are a recurring theme in this collection, to no surprise. Immigrants feel displaced in Western lands, and sometimes also face horrifying racism, as in Lee Murray’s harrowing and surreal “The Poppy Cloud.” But the children of immigrants, or those who immigrated when very young, in turn often feel disoriented and foreign in the lands of their parents. Three stories deal directly with this second type of disorientation and loss: “Things to Know Before You Go” by Nadia Bulkin, “Mindfulness” by Rena Mason, and “New Ancestors” by Robert Nazar Arjoyan. In these stories, old legends and spirits of ancestral lands rise to claim the children who have returned. All three stories are wonderfully creepy and unsettling. I particularly loved Arjoyan’s “New Ancestors,” an absolutely surreal tale of increasing horror and wildness, which follows the adventures of a pair of Armenian-American twins who spend a night carousing through the streets of Armenia’s capital city, enjoying a break between high school and college. After a bar brawl, things take a very distinctly strange turn. . . I love the way the writer just goes there in this story, literalizing common metaphors and pushing them to the extreme, ending in a hallucinatory tale that tastes of apocalyptic/cosmic/world-bending horror.

 

In terms of extreme horror and body horror, two other stories stand out in addition to “New Ancestors,”: “Pig Feet” by Yi Izzy Yu and “Under Blades We Lie Still” by Christopher Hann. Yu’s tale mixes old ideas of shamanism and possession with musings on current science in a heady, deeply unsettling and disturbing tale of revenge (I think I found this the most unsettling tale in the entire book). Hann’s story is an intense, moving tale of grief and loss and guilt, told through the medium of visceral body horror, as a young man struggles with the aftermath of his parents’ death.

 

There’s more in this collection of 20 stories, ranging from delicate tales lightly tinged with horror to full-blown visceral horror. A list of content warnings is given in the back of the book, and thoughtful essays by the editor give historical context and commentary. This is a darkly beautiful book, and an important one as well. Each tale is distinct, and a range of voices, themes, and styles are collected. But there are common, recurring themes. Brought together, these common themes resonate and hum; the stories sing together, and the whole is greater than its parts. While reading this, I thought of another groundbreaking anthology of Asian horror, the Bram Stoker Award and Shirley Jackson award-winning Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women (edited by Lee Murray and Geneve Flynn). In its spotlighting of voices of the Asian diaspora, I find Silk and Sinew similarly groundbreaking and a future classic.

 

Insect Hag and Other Stories by Yvette Tan

A slim collection by a star of the Philippines horror scene. These are wonderfully odd, unsettling tales that situate the supernatural amidst the grit and mundanity of everyday life in the Philippines. The centerpiece of this collection is the novella, “Antingera,” a furious and moving story about a woman avenging the death of her husband by police violence. There’s fury and grief in this tale, amid satisfying twists and turns and the barest trace of humor (a policeman whose wife sells crystals). The dark mood is enhanced by the wonderfully creepy black-and-white illustrations by the artist MPAU/Malayo Pa and Umaga.

 

Zhiguai: Chinese Tales of the Paranormal and Glitches in the Matrix, edited and translated by Yi Izzy Yu and John Yu Branscum

 

Yi Izzy Yu and John Yu Branscum are the power team of editors and translators who brought to life one of my favorite collections, The Shadow Book of Ji Yun, a wondrous curation of weird little Chinese tals—also known as zhiguai—which were collected by the eighteenth century Chinese writer (as well as Imperial Librarian, Special Advisor to the Emperor, Head of the Department of War, and holder of other grand titles) Ji Yun (my review of The Shadow Book here). And so, I was delighted to get my hands on this power team’s follow-up of a collection of modern weird/horror stories from China—in other words, modern zhiguai

 

Like Ji Yun’s tales from eighteenth century China, the tales of Zhiguai are all presented as true. In their introductory essay, the editors describe these tales as “glitch-in-the-matrix” stories, stories that “mean any personal experiences that makes us question the nature of reality or our ability to know it.” In this book are tales of doppelgangers, ghosts, averted disasters, and objects that seem to leap through time. Most haunting are the tales in which narrators seem to slip briefly into parallel worlds, worlds just like our own but ever so slightly “off.” Or, in some cases, “off” in far more shocking and frightening ways. Though very different in setting and content from Ji Yun’s zhiguai, there is nevertheless a discernible line connecting them. As the editors note, the stories in both books are ones that seem to question, unsettle, and undermine reality itself. Each story in Zhiguai is prefaced with a brief introduction that provides cultural context or other commentary. For me, the glimpses of ordinary life in modern China—alongside these eerie little tales undermining that ordinary life—were also a great part of this eerie little book’s appeal. A wonderfully disconcerting book of odd tales.