![]() ![]() Animism lingers in these selected Southeast Asian stories that center around “hantu,” the Malay word meaning “ghost” or “spirit.” Here are ten books in which ghosts manifest themselves in vampires, virtuous spirits, and more-all set in Southeast Asia and told by the prominent Southeast Asian writers of our time. So these ghost-story novels and collections from Southeast Asian writers feel familiar to me: they deal with the same restless spirits and the same sense of displacement. These ghost stories had to do with diaspora-characters, living or not living, wandering the earth and navigating the conflicts of displacement. My parents often loosely improvised “scary” stories about ancient ghosts from the Hebrew Bible and old Korean folktales, in which spirits manifested themselves in ways that weren’t always malicious or evil. These stories were often used to teach me lessons on how to behave and live however, instead of malevolent ghosts looking to terrorize people for their misdoings, I was more interested in ghosts who haunted people with the intention of connecting with them. Of the bedtime stories my parents told me, I took the most interest in the ones involving ghosts and spirits. The book has 15 time lines, its form inspired by the young-adult Choose Your Own Adventure books: the choices the reader makes determine the course of the narrative, much like in life itself. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work. But Intan Paramaditha’s debut novel, The Wandering, takes this escapist impulse and turns it into a tale of limits. ![]()
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