The Halloween Edition
Tiffany Tsao • 29 October 2021
In the spirit of the season, this issue channels all manner of spirits and fiendish creatures. There’s no escaping them. Even as you’re reading this, they’re breathing down your neck. Whether it’s the ghosts of passions past or the witches and demons next door, carnage being inflicted on the natural world or the menacing wasteland of suburbia, the monsters aren’t coming to get you. They’re already here. And more of them are hard at work, writing the pieces that keep you up at night.
Apocalypse, then (and now, carbon lullabies)
'history: a horror story
this country cursed by its founding myth —
you may tame god by taming the land'
This epic nonfiction poem by Koori and Lebanese writer Mykaela Saunders exposes the root of Australia’s environmental crisis nightmare, charting its evil course all the way through to our present: ‘post-apocalypse, not yet post-colonial’.
Grief Ghost
'I was texting a dead person, a ghost, and there was no point waiting for a response. I blocked her and then unblocked her. I put her on mute and pretended she didn’t exist...We all text dead people sometimes. To others, we might be the dead people they text.'
A memoir essay on the grief of being ghosted by someone you love intensely. Images of Vita Sackville-West and lines drawn from her correspondence with Virginia Woolf haunt the piece, a spectral ideal of mutually requited desire that lies beyond the writer’s reach.
Pontianak (Malaysia)
'There is another layer to the story, a cruel twist. The pontianak can be lured away from her home in the banana trees. If you shear her hair short, clip her nails and hammer a nail into the nape of her neck, she will become a docile and doting wife, indistinguishable from the average woman. If you remove the nail, she will return to her old vampiric proclivities.'
The pontianak is a creature to be feared – a woman who died in childbirth or pregnancy and who now roams the earth, disembowelling victims (often, men) with her long nails and feasting on their organs. The legend is specific to the Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia region (in the latter she is known as the ‘kuntilanak’). Wong reflects on what the pontianak myth says about the thin line between unrestrained monster and ‘docile’ woman.
Witchcraft, charming, &c.
'On the 14th of May, 1643, you are denounced as a witch by your neighbours. You are charged with witchcraft, charming &c. and soon you will be sentenced to die.'
Aided by historical records of witch trials in early modern Scotland, Henry-Jones summons up the spirit of a woman who was tried and condemned. The piece adopts a seance-like feel as the ‘you’ addressed by the author takes on the task of channelling the dead.
Hoa Pham reviews Anguli Ma: A Gothic Tale by Chi Vu
'The suburban setting is portrayed as stark and unfriendly to the Vietnamese characters. The characterisation of Anguli Ma is similarly intense, from the bloody scissors he uses for his work at the abattoir, to the running over and eating of a dog in a suburban wasteland.'
Hoa Pham, writer, playwright, and founding editor of Peril, illuminates the Buddhist and Australian gothic elements in Chi Vu’s 2013 novella Anguli Ma: A Gothic Tale, which was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Community Relations Prize. Hoa Pham observes that, importantly, Chi Vu’s dark novella offers ‘a counter-narrative to the brightness of other popular refugee narratives’.
Those interested in reading the critical essay on 1.5 Generation Vietnamese-American writers by Chi Vu, which is referenced in the piece, can do so via the Kunapipi magazine archive.
Perhaps this edition has whetted your appetite for scary stories. You can listen to this interview with SJ Norman on their recent short-story collection Permafrost - ‘an inversion and queering of the gothic and romantic traditions’. Or read this Guardian Australia review of Michelle de Kretser’s latest novel Scary Monsters – which consists of two conjoined tales.
We value the recommendations and insights of others! Many thanks to those who suggested Panda Wong’s ‘Pontianak (Malaysia)’ and Chi Vu’s Anguli Ma: A Gothic Tale for inclusion in this issue.
To close on a less spooky note: a belated and hearty congratulations to this year’s four finalists for The Writers’ Prize (a subcategory of the Melbourne Prize for Literature 2021). David Sornig, Eloise Grills, Ouyang Yu, and Vivian Blaxwell, we salute you! A call to action for our subscribers: consider reading their excellent essays so you can cast your vote before the 10 November deadline.