WHO'S THERE?

Rio explores people’s worst impulses in this collection of Indonesia-set horror stories.

The scariest yarns often hinge on core human relationships. In the title story of this collection, a man sits with his friends, dodging questions about the whereabouts of his fiancée, who, for some reason, hasn’t shown up to dinner. The man knows why she isn’t there (and he’s to blame), but he has no idea about the macabre circumstances in which he will meet her again. In another tale, “The Wandering,” a security guard in an office building has been stealing at night to help pay for his pregnant wife’s medical bills. The building has a reputation for ghostly hauntings, and on one particular night his thieving is plagued by strange noises and the discovery of lost love letters. In “The Forest Protector,” a woman with a history of self-harm takes her young son across town to escape her abusive husband. As the story shifts in perspective between the woman and the boy, a complex dynamic is revealed involving love, pain, and imagination. Across these eight stories, parents speak from beyond the grave, deceitful jinns wrap children in their clutches, and vengeful ghosts haunt cottonwood trees. Perhaps the most effective story is “My Heirloom, You’ll Be,” which brilliantly captures the creepiness of the maternal influence when it comes to picking a mate: A young woman begins dating one of the men at work—mostly just to get her mother off her back about finding a husband—only to realize, slowly, that the man she has chosen has his own mommy issues. The story begins, rather bracingly, “The mother’s eyes widened when she saw her son fornicating with a dishonourable woman,” foreshadowing the complex fears and motivations that may attend any romantic pairing.

Rio combines a penchant for inventive imagery with a talent for conveying intense character interiority, as evidenced here in a passage from the title story about the missing fiance: “Adam laughed along with his friend, mostly because he was relieved that he had been able to stop his friend’s fast train of jokes, before it crashed through the hidden cavities of his soul, where creatures like anxiety, shame and fear resided. These creatures were undetectable by the senses, but they continued to squirm; to pester; to crave, like a snake.” The pieces have a distinctive texture, incorporating not only details of life in contemporary Indonesia but also Indonesian folkloric elements like the Kuntilanak, a female ghost who can be imprisoned by a man in order to bring him wealth. The stories often begin or end with a few lines of poetry or an Islamic hadith that help to frame Rio’s meaning. The prose may feel a bit mannered for readers of contemporary American horror fiction, but the author’s commitment to building emotionally realistic situations in which to insert his supernatural scares makes this a memorable offering. The most disturbing element of each story is almost always occasioned by human cruelty: the ways in which men treat women, parents treat children, and society treats individuals.

A collection of chilling tales steeped in Indonesian folklore.