Mortuary Tales - Kashif Mashaikh

5/5

Waiting for a new novel to be published always equals anticipation and excitement – it comes with the territory – even more so when the book is a debut. I can safely say Kashif Mashaikh’s ‘Mortuary Tales’ was well worth the wait.

An easily digestible 240 pages of original storytelling, Mortuary Tales offers bite-sized portions of classic horror that give readers a glimpse into the bone-chilling realms of the supernatural. These stories boast a wide thematic range – from the subtle hint of terror to the downright macabre. An obsessed failed actor is convinced his neighbours are a family of vampires, while a guilt-ridden pest control expert wrestles with his sins as they come back to haunt him. An old woman plays tug-of-war with an increasingly exasperated grim reaper and a fertility clinic harbours more than frozen embryos within its menacing walls.

Not all the stories draw from inspiration from the beyond though. Some of them also reflect the innate darkness latent in the human psyche and the horrors that play out when this brooding darkness suckles on the teats of passing time, nourishing itself with the inevitability of dire situations, growing and growing till it reaches monster-like proportions, and finally decides to manifest in dramatic inter-human relationships and actions, that once taken, cannot be undone. In many ways, this kind of darkness that stems from the mind and heart of an average human is far more terrifying than anything the beyond has to offer.

An interesting aspect of the structure of this collection of short stories is the relationship between the narrator and his mentor/teacher Jeevanram, who’s advanced years and wealth of experience with human nature helps the narrator grow as a person. Although each story is different, these two characters are constants, threading the stories like a leis, without tying them up into complex knots.

I finished the book in a day, and one story that stood out and really stuck with me like velcro, was ‘The Lookalike’. Spectral and sinister, Mashaikh draws out the protagonist’s tremendous mental and emotional struggles, even as she normalizes an event in her life that is in every way an aberration at least, an abomination at most. I felt a haunting inside me as I turned the pages, a sense of something that is so blatantly not right, like experiencing sleep paralysis when an entity’s presence is felt so keenly and clearly and yet it doesn’t exist. That ominous, dreamlike state when you clearly see something and feel it with every tactile sense, and yet a part of you knows it’s not real. It was so expertly written that I even looked over my shoulder on occasion. Just to make sure. The story ended vaguely – was it really all a mental construct or was there something there not of this world that made itself known at the opportune moment? When I finished reading the book, the only thing that disappointed me is that I didn’t have closure with this story. I want to know more about the protagonist and what happened to her after the story ended? Does she ever experience something like that again or does she pick up the pieces of her life and move on, as the incident fades in her memory with the passing years?

All in all, a fantastic debut short story collection and clearly a labour of love undertaken over many years, Mortuary Tales is definitely a book with a difference and one I’d certainly recommend.