The Other City of Angels by S.P Somtow is a modern retelling of the Gothic tale of Bluebeard’s wife and her fatal discovery of her husband’s dark secret. Filled in equal measures with romance, terror, and laughter, the novel portrays Bangkok as a Gothic metropolis: a city stuck between illusion and reality, where dreams and nightmares come to life, simultaneously backwards and modern, spiritual and material, and full of peculiarities that make one doubt whether such a place exists at all. (KA)
The Shadow Book of Ji Yun is a collection of strange stories (the genre formally known as zhiguai) written by an eighteen-century Chinese writer and philosopher, Ji Yun. This lively contemporary translation by Yi Izzy Yu and John Yu Branscum, includes some great examples of early ghost stories that were instrumental in shaping supernatural tales in the region. (KA)
Ponti by Sharlene Teo is a monster story with a difference. Set in contemporary Singapore, and told in three parallel narrative strands in roughly 20-year time intervals, the novel engages with the Malay mythology of the pontianak (a vengeful female spirit) which functions in the text as a reflection on the nature of monstrosity in relation to memory, femininity and motherhood. (KA)
Dream of Ding Village by Yan Lianke paints a bleak picture of the world created through the coupling of communist wastefulness with capitalist greed. Narrated by a ghost of a teenage boy murdered in an act of vengeance against his family, the novel offers a darkly satirical portrayal of the 1990s AIDS epidemic that engulfed several rural Chinese provinces in the aftermath of the government’s Plasma Economy campaign. (KA)
Beauty is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan got me hooked from the moment I read the first sentence of the blurb: “One stormswept afternoon, after twenty-one years of being dead, the beautiful Indonesian prostitute, Dewi Ayu rises from her grave to avenge a curse placed on her family.” What could be a more perfect introduction to Indonesian Gothic than a story filled with colonial and post-colonial hauntings, curses, demonic pregnancies, communist ghosts and undead heroines ready to right the wrongs? (KA)
Goth by Otsuichi is a collection of six stories told in fragmented narratives from competing perspectives of killers, victims, and a dog and linked by two recurring characters brought together by their shared interest in the macabre. Modelled on the honkaku mysteries that showcase deduction skills and lead to a surprising discovery, Goth is an example of a “light novel” – a serialised pulp magazine style fiction targeting young adult demographics. (KA)
The Vegetarian by Han Kang (trans. Deborah Smith) – Set in modern day South Korea, this short novel reminded me of Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman in its body horror centered around a young woman’s decision to stop eating meat (or more) and the pathologising reactions of those closest to her. Other critics have traced its ecogothic credentials. (Sarah Olive, Bangor)
The Bonesetter’s Daughter and Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan – These novels add ghostly and gory dimensions to Tan’s trademark plots featuring young, Chinese-American women questing after their family tree and a sense of belonging, negotiating their transnational ethnic identity. (Sarah Olive, Bangor)
The Astonishing Colour of After by Emily X.R. Pan -Set in America and Taiwan, this young adult novel has elements of gothic, including allusions to Emily Dickinson’s poetry, ghosts and ghostly communications …including an explanation of the East-Asian buddhist concept of the hungry ghost and its associated festival, supernatural avians and a central concern with memory and remembering. It’s also notable for its heterosexual, lesbian and cross-cultural love stories (Sarah Olive, Bangor).