The Sun paper made a compliment on Tunku Halim’s latest writings on 44 Cemetery Road as “Horror with a bloody heart…tales of the strange and macabre.” Off The Edge magazine did a review on 44 Cemetery Road and without hesitation I bought the book and read it in awe and somehow felt disgusted all at the same time. His writing is very vivid and impressive; his technique was distinctive, original and reminds you of Roald Dahl’s young adult short stories. For you people out there Tunku Halim is our local writer well known for his masterpieces like A Children’s History of Malaysia, Vermillion Eye and The Rape of Martha Teoh and other Chilling Tales to name a few. People, if you find horror stories intriguing, Tunku Halim’s novels might be in your list.
Anyway in this 44 Cemetery Road, it has 21 short stories and I am very, very, very disturbed with one of the stories – Malay Magick. I felt fucked because in Malay Magick, Tunku Halim's imagination was dark, sufficiently genius, plainly seductive, unexpectedly unsettling and it is not sane. To summarize, Malay Magick tells a tale of this British man that is described as old and physically unwell and is searching of faith in life. This mat salleh then stumbles into this shop hidden at the back alley of London’s buzy streets run by perhaps a good guess would be a Malaysian or an Indonesian man that exhibits strange and antique collections in his shop. Inevitably, the owner is abnormal and everything about him is so mysterious that this cacat mat salleh is hypnotized or syok dijampi by the owner, as if on trance willingly allow the owner to tease him to further explore the corners and the darkness of his maze-like basement of his shop. The owner led him to one of the dark rooms and locked the brainless mat saleh in the room with a creature – which Tunku Halim picturize it as a hairless and covered with scales, lipless, in-between animal nor human, shaped like a female seahorse, sagging scrotums and an fully erect and scale penis that sways at the sight of the mindless mat saleh.
I haven’t got into the sordid details yet. This binatang asing rapes the now-gatai mat saleh and to my bewilderment, the mat saleh is suddenly enjoying the forced sex with the creature and it was so sexually satisfying that he wanted more. Remember I mentioned this bodoh mat saleh is unwell right? Well the love making with this monster did cure him and the story ended dull and simple, it tells how he became a mad alcoholic that wander the streets in search of faith in life for he will never know the secrets of living life. Damn, even after making love to a monster?
Malay Magick, from my humble opinion, is so mental and disturbing. Let me know if any of you would like to read 44 Cemetery Road.
2 comments:
and this is precisely why i can't seem to get into locally-authored fiction. i'm not being but local fiction neither evokes poignancy nor stretches the boundaries of my mind in any way that's original. growing up with singapore ghost stories and the like, i found even then that the recurrent theme was disturbing sex/ horror that was unreal, plain unimaginative and the resulting combination, as you put it, just mental. yuck taste in my mouth*
sorry, that was meant to be:
'...i'm not being a foreigner-worshipper here but local fiction...'
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