UNQUIET SPIRITS ESSAYS BY ASIAN WOMEN IN HORROR

2/8/2022

UNQUIET SPIRITS Essays by Asian Women in Horror, Edited by multi-Bram Stoker Award®-winning author Lee Murray and Stoker®-winner Angela Yuriko Smith, and includes a foreword by Stoker®-winner Lisa Kröger

The third in Murray and Smith’s Bram Stoker Award®-winning series on Asian women in horror, which includes the poetry collection Tortured Willows and fiction short story collection Black Cranes.

From hungry ghosts, vampiric babies, and shapeshifting fox spirits to the avenging White Lady of urban legend. . .

For generations, Asian women’s roles have been shaped and defined through myth and story. In Unquiet Spirits, Asian writers of horror reflect on the impact of superstition, spirits, and the supernatural in this unique collection of personal essays exploring themes of otherness, identity, expectation, duty, and loss, and leading, ultimately, to understanding and empowerment.

These women share what it is like to live with unquiet spirits--ghosts, demons, witches and vampires--common to the Asian experience. Articulate, they catalogue pain, humiliation, denial, and hunger through a supernatural lens, proving that the spirit world is a mirror image of our own - the horror is on both sides of the veil.

Check out these exclusive extracts from Unquiet Spirits

“…you don’t need a whole lot of ritual to access the spirit world in Indonesia. I always tell people that you can feel it as soon as you step off the plane, though that’s probably the humidity: the spirit world has constant access to you. Which isn’t to say that spirits have nothing better to do than bother you, but humans are meddling in those waters, too. Spiritual energy can make you sick, cause you misfortune, steal your money, steal your spouse, steal your kid. It crashes planes and starts earthquakes and determines trial outcomes. It’s the country’s biggest, richest black market, and you’re really better off not messing with it if you’re not a spiritual elder of some kind.”-- Nadia Bulkin, from her essay “Becoming Ungovernable: Latah, Amok, and Disorder in Indonesia”

“Hungry ghosts—like most ghosts—are generally invisible. Their suffering is unseen. They may be moving among us right now, begging for food from us, unheard (Gaki Zoshi, 12th cent).

“What happens when hunger is unrecognized by others? What happens when it’s unacknowledged even by the one possessing it? How long can you suppress your hunger? How long can you push it down, squelch it down, keep it down, and deny it?”-- Vanessa Fogg, from her essay “Hungry Ghosts in America”

“Identity can be a brutal thing, and, for me, oddly correlates to Korean stories of the fox spirit, kumiho. The fox spirit appears across many Asian mythologies, most known are the huli-jing of Chinese lore, or the kitsune of Japanese mythos. In each, the stories describe a shapeshifting fox who usually transforms into a beautiful woman. But the goals of the spirit vary, at times sinister and others benevolent. However, in Korean mythologies the kumiho embodies a particular and consistent malevolent edge. Dark and bloody, the original kumiho is a thing of nightmares, a sinister being, almost always female, who feeds upon human flesh.”-- K.P. Kulski, from her essay “100 Livers”

“I learned about demons before I learned about angels, and of preta—hungry ghosts—before I heard of buddhas or bodhisattvas. One childhood summer my sister brought home from Taiwan our dead uncle’s demon, the demon he inherited from Grandpa. Maybe it was my fault. Over the years I’ve gotten creative with how I convince myself it wasn’t.”-- Benebell Wen, from her essay “Ghost Month in Taiwan”:

“For countless generations, women have been consumed over and over in the service of men and society. They have been uprooted and planted in new soil.”— Doungjai Gam, from her essay” tethered chokeholds”

“…it is usually women who haunt the home, passively hidden in the shadowy closets and abandoned attics of a house, silent and present, as if waiting for another person to simply listen to them, to allow them the grace to be at peace. Ghosts are never about what the spirit had done while she was alive; it is always about what was done to her while she was alive, and how that violence, that injustice, tethers her to the world of the living, even though she is already dead.”

“In this banquet of pain, this feast of silenced voices and pieces of ourselves, I bring the roaming head of a nukekubi as my dish. This is what happens when we are no longer passive, when we let ourselves escape our bodies for a few moments and become us.”— Angela Yuriko Smith, from her essay “Tearing Ourselves Apart: The Nukekubi”

Lindy Ryan is a bestselling and multi-award-winning author-editor-director with numerous titles in development for film/television adaptation. An award-winning professor, Lindy has published two textbooks on visual data analytics as well as numerous papers and chapters. She also writes seasonal romance as Lindy Miller and is the author of the forthcoming books-to-film Renovate My Heart and The Magic Ingredient. Lindy currently serves as a board member for the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA) and was named a 2020 Publishers Weekly Star Watch Honoree. She is an active member and staff volunteer for the Horror Writers Association.

Lisa Kröger is a Stoker and Locus award-winning writer living in Memphis. She holds a Ph.D. in Gothic literature and writes horror in all formats. She’s an active member of the Horror Writers Association and the NYX Horror Collective, a group focused on women-created genre content for film, television, and new media. Most recently, she produced 13 Minutes of Horror: Folklore, which streamed on Shudder. She's also a host on the Monster, She Wrote and Know Fear podcasts, biweekly casts that dissects the horror genre.