Hantu!
38 pages, staple-bound softcover, A5. Color cover, black-and-white interior. New.
Essays and fiction about hantu, the monsters of Malaysian lore.
The toyol: an imp created from a dead fetus, a consummate thief. The penanggalan: a vampire whose head and entrails leave its body, to fly about in the night. The hantu tetek, who smothers victims between its massive breasts.
“Hantu” — of Malaysian popular lore — is typically translated as “ghost”, though this isn’t quite right; “spirit” or “monster” are better. Hantu are feared, often malevolent, highly variable.
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Hantu! presents five short, interconnected essays about hantu — musings about their place in the Malaysian psyche; thoughts about gender, genre, and writing about non-European things in an European language.
Hantu! also presents five short fiction pieces, each focusing on a made-up hantu, generated using the included Malaysian Hantu Generator — a set of eight random tables.
An appendix to A Thousand Thousand Islands, an RPG zine series inspired by the material cultures, lived stories, and mythistories of Southeast Asia.
By Zedeck Siew.