Essays and fiction about hantu, the monsters of Malaysian lore.

The toyol: an imp created from a dead fetus, a consummate thief. The penanggalan: a vampire whose head and entrails leave its body, to fly about in the night. The hantu tetek, who smothers victims between its massive breasts.

Hantu of Malaysian popular lore  is typically translated as ghost, though this isnt quite right; spirit or monster are better. Hantu are feared, often malevolent, highly variable.

Hantu! presents five short, interconnected essays about hantu musings about their place in the Malaysian psyche; thoughts about gender, genre, and writing about non-European things in an European language.

Hantu! also presents five short fiction pieces, each focusing on a made-up hantu, generated using the included Malaysian Hantu Generator a set of eight random tables.

An appendix to A Thousand Thousand Islands, an RPG zine series inspired by the material cultures, lived stories, and mythistories of Southeast Asia.

By Zedeck Siew.