Evil under the South Asian sun

This anthology of horror stories with rich and relatable imagery transports the reader to an eerie valley between what’s real and what’s not.

Midnight Doorways is an anthology of seven short stories written by British fantasy writer and Bram Stoker Award-winning author, Usman T Malik. These stories use horror as a lens to peer deep into the life of a common man. Malik has woven the dark and the grim into contemporary tales that are already gory, disturbing, and supernatural. As a child who grew up on R L Stine’s Goosebumps and transitioned to reading Stephen King and the like as I grew older, Midnight Doorways was a new reading experience because of its intermingling of South Asian culture with horror.

It is this fusion that makes the anthology a unique collection of speculative fiction with elements of horror that invoke a deeply unsettling feeling and takes you to the uncanny valley between what is real and is not. The stories are chilling but with a human element to them and touch upon the loss of loved ones, frailty, and tragic deaths. Malik weaves his horror stories through human journeys of love, hatred, drug abuse, loneliness and terrorism.

Haunting imagery

The anthology begins with a tale of haunting pain. In ‘Ishq’, an eerie story of two lovers separated not by death and decay but by a furious storm, Malik describes the feeling of ‘ishq’ as “the state of a lover’s heart during separation, contemplation or annihilation unto the lover. The point where the lover becomes the beloved. Sometimes it also means nostalgia for a love forever gone, a love that never was and love that remains after death.”

In ‘The Wandering City’ he writes about a haunted, enchanted city that shows up in Lahore and becomes a huge tourist attraction, creating wealthy individuals out of many but at midnight, it opens its tombs to devour all who enter. In ‘Resurrection Points’ he touches upon the rift between religious groups in Pakistan in a story that deals with the reanimation of the dead.In ‘The Fortune of Sparrows’, he brings to life an age-old horror where an orphan girl comes to the realisation that at an age that is considered too old, the orphanage would sell her as a wife to earn enough to look after the next set of girls. The girl, through whom the story is told, is troubled by silent birds and visions of people from the past walking restlessly through rippling mirrors in the moonlight.

‘Dead Lovers on Each Blade, Hung’ is the most intriguing of the collection. It talks of the love between Hakim Shafi and his child bride, Maliha who goes missing. The story is told through a conversation between a heroin addict and a police inspector. What sets the story apart is its narrator who is confounded by the horrors she has witnessed but is desperate to not be seen as a crazy addict.

A monstrous revenge

The Bram Stoker winning story, ‘The Vaporisation Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family’ is dedicated to ‘145 innocents of the 16/12 Peshawar terrorist attack and the countless unknown and known before’. This is a heart-wrenching tale of revenge that blossoms from loss and turns into something monstrous. The last story of the collection, ‘In The Ruins of Mohenjo-Daro’ is the most terrifying of the seven and akin to the movie ‘Night at The Museum’, but this one is a version wrought with violence and death.

Malik is no doubt a talented writer. His stories are unique in that they are not horror for horror’s sake but are centred around mostly ordinary people with relatable problems.

The writing somehow convinces you that the stories are coming straight from the author’s heart — a heart that loves its motherland and is passionate about its people and culture. That said, I do think that this book is for everyone. Ardent lovers of horror may feel dissatisfied with the attention given to the rich language and setting rather than the actual elements of fright. I prefer my horror to be plain in its intent to keep me up at night and I am sure there are many like me.

Nevertheless, Midnight Doorways is something even conventional horror addicts ought to explore. I would also recommend it to people who enjoy South Asian imagery in writing and look for inner meaning in each and every story while being able to handle a modest amount of the supernatural.