SPIRITS ABROAD

A collection of speculative stories that play on Malaysian folklore and fantasy tropes with humor and compassion.

Split into three sections—Here, There, and Elsewhere—this expanded edition of Cho’s 2014 collection takes readers from present-day Malaysia to a boarding school in Britain to Earth thousands of years in the future, showcasing the author’s broad storytelling range. Stories in the first section, Here, are set primarily in Malaysia and explore themes as mundane as teenage love, intergenerational family tensions, and school pressures through the prism of the fantastical. The collection opens with “The First Witch of Damansara,” in which Vivian—a young Malaysian woman who has immigrated to a “modern Western country”—returns to Malaysia after the death of her grandmother, a witch whose powers Vivian has not inherited. When Vivian begins to receive visits from her grandmother in her dreams, she experiences a change of heart about the cultural traditions she had formerly disavowed. Other stories in this section similarly combine folklore with the mundane: A schoolgirl allows an enchanted koi fish to brutalize her in exchange for good grades in “The Fish Bowl,” while in “The House of Aunts,” a young vampire falls in love with a Muslim boy at school, much against the advice of the aunts who have raised her. While stories in the There section are set primarily in the U.K. and those in Elsewhere, in more otherworldly settings, both sections explore more fantastical terrains than the first: teenagers at an English boarding school battle fairies, women are wooed unexpectedly by dragons, and the Chinese lunar goddess, Chang E, is reenvisioned as an extraterrestrial college student. The stories are told with the precise and almost sparse voice of fairy tales, but they can sometimes veer toward the excessively fanciful. Some, like “One-Day Travelcard for Fairyland” and “If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again,” rely too much on humor and speculative elements without quite landing. Nevertheless, the collection’s most moving stories harness seamless worldbuilding, intriguing character development, and thematic complexity.

A swath of delightful and intricate stories from a wildly inventive storyteller.