Along with the latest general update, over the last month or two I also had the opportunity to read three works by Malaysian-born, Quebec-based writer Cassandra Khaw. A quick look at their personal site shows a heavy focus on horror, especially evident in their ‘day job’ at Ubisoft.
One of these covers is just a tad more honest than the other. No points for guessing which…
First on the agenda was 2015’s Rupert Wong, Cannibal Chef. Wong is many things: a former triad soldier, a sorcerer, significant other to a flesh-eating ghost, chef for a ruthless family of ghouls who dine on human flesh, and a bureaucrat of sorts for the Ten Chinese Hells. What he is not is either overly smart or particularly lucky. And it shows.
Wong haplessly bounces from struggle to struggle, always seemingly a beat behind the possibly deadly machinations of the assorted deities and un- or super-natural beings with whom he deals. The world Khaw has crafted is vivid and chaotic. Kuala Lumpur is a celestial crossroads of sorts, crammed with spirits from several different traditions, including a visiting group of Greek furies who figure prominently in the mystery Wong needs to solve.
This is not a long story. The Kindle version runs to less than 100 pages, but it felt meatier than that. Khaw sketches out a surprisingly immersive world and has the nack of fleshing out characters with minimal but artful descriptions. Underlying everything, though, is a sense of darkness and the harsh, unforgiving reality of the world through which the characters move.
I’m having trouble getting the sound of that out of my head. Seriously.
This harshness also pervades the 2016 Hammers on Bone, another deceptively short (68 pages) work. The protagonist (“hero” seems a bit of a stretch, even if he is the notional good ...guy? ...creature? ...being? ...in the equation), John Persons, is a private investigator who’s hired by a ten year old to kill his stepdad. Again, nothing like a little light reading, right?
Persons quickly discovers that more has gone wrong here than first meets the eye, and we discover there is more to Persons as well. Substantially more. The tension between the two sides of Persons is a subtle strata under the other conflicts Khaw skillfully layers into the story.
Khaw also draws the reader into an angle unifying Persons and a much older occult framework, H.P. Lovecraft. This is a little less smooth and convincing than the main story line, at least to my take. It was still a strong and bold move to embed the story in a large, dynamic and evolving universe. And it generally works.
Now I have to read the other book in the Persons series, A Song For Quiet.
Harshness of a different kind also permeates The All-Consuming World, released in early September, 2021. This is a full novel, 288 pages of initially confusing and eventually compelling storytelling overlaying a complex set of personal journeys and sometimes broken, sometimes abusive interpersonal relationships.
The characters here are the survivors of an elite, all-female criminal gang, the “Dirty Dozen.” Khaw here seems to be using this unoriginal name to center her non-binary, gender- and body-shifting protagonists in a larger literary and film tradition. And it works. The setting is a classic quest to locate one of their number who went missing 40 years earlier, and who is now in peril.
This is a galaxy where humans are a diminished and potentially endangered species, where AIs of various degrees of malevolence plot to maintain their domination, and where the womens identities and senses of themselves will be tested to the limit while they continue to endure and explore the legacy of lives of exquisite length and equally exquisite suffering and pain.
Identity is a central question threaded through the story, both for them as individuals and as a group--Khaw touches in places on the identity and affiliations of some of the opposing side as well, which makes an interesting contrast to the Dirty Dozen. It was a satisfying read: after a slow start Khaw winds up spinning a dynamic tale with many threads, tying it off at the end with a dynamic flourish.
Taken together, I found the three stories presented an interesting portrait of the author’s evolution. Rupert Wong I thought of as coming from exploring a home or original territory, in a sense. The motif is the mixing of cultures and races, and messy overlapping boundaries and conflicts that can create.
Persons, by contrast, is an inhabitant of an entirely different world--literally and figuratively--who Khaw ties into the larger Lovecraftian universe. This is stretching writing to accommodate an existing framework without losing one’s own originality.
And in the final novella, we see a burst of complexity and--sometimes--subtlety which are a stage change from the first two. The character of Maya, in particular, was challenging for both her brutality and, at the same time, evolution. The story marks a stage in Khaw’s evolution as a writer, as both her characters and the setting for the story are de novo to a degree I didn’t pick up in the first two.
Khaw is an exquisite writer with a rich vocabulary and an evocative style that kept me coming back, even in the parts of The All-Consuming World which dipped briefly in a confusingly opaque blur.
I’m looking forward to the next stage, the upcoming release of Nothing But Blackened Teeth, and seeing where Khaw goes next.