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)