Category: Books

Blazing saddles

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, so the well-beaten adage goes. Nobody better proves this as a truism than Val Benson, the lead character in Jame DiBiasio’s first novel Gaijin Cowgirl, a thrilling and often violent romp of a story that takes the reader on a fast-paced journey from the hostess bars of Tokyo to Hong Kong to the concrete and natural jungles of Thailand.

The plot revolves around gold stolen by the Japanese during WWII in the form of an enormous solid gold Buddha, and the desperate efforts by the multinational cast of characters (bar hostesses, a former Japanese colonel, vicious businessmen, a gold hunter, Thai and foreign Muay Thai boxers, a Thai journalist, a former CIA man and an American Congressman) to recover the treasure from its hiding place deep in the jungles of Thailand’s Kanchanaburi province – the site of the River Kwai Bridge and the infamous Death Railway.

Val is a chaos attracter. We’ve all known at least one or two in our lives: people who have a knack for finding themselves in out-of-control situations that sweep up everyone around that person in a swirl of destructive force, that often as not leaves the person at the centre of it virtually unscathed, while relatively innocent bystanders, guilty only by association with such a person, pay the price. And in this book, plenty of prices are paid.

The latest blood and guts novel from ‘quality pulp’ publisher Crime Wave Press, Gaijin Cowgirl is a gripping and escalating read from the beginning until the final pages and the perfect companion with which to while away several hours on a long train journey, or a quiet evening at home. It is not ideal toilet reading, however, since you’ll end up staying in the bathroom flipping the pages for so long that your family will wonder what you’re doing in there.

And for those looking for something sexy, there’s not that much sex in it, with any sex scenes ‘fading to black’ and leaving the nitty gritty of things to the reader’s imagination – if they care to distract themselves from the sweep of the story. Titillation is not the aim of this book.

Gaijin Cowgirl, by Jame DiBiasio, is now available in eBook form from Amazon.com for $6.24.

Psychotic ladyboys & flesh-eating lizards

Red Night Zone_1Bangkok pulp writer James Newman has hammered out another shot-from-the-hip fast-as-they-come thriller, featuring recovering alcoholic and PI Joe Dylan drifting through the Zone, a sly reference to William Burrough’s Interzone – a place where all races lead to the bottom, all smiles are false and everyone is out to kill everyone else for a few bucks. Like Burroughs, Newman both despises and admires the darkness he has witnessed and he manages to harvest a modicum of tragedy in his newest story.

Joe Dylan gets involved with a bar girl who turns up dead soon after. As he begins to investigate her suspicious suicide, he soon slips into a criminal web of fetish sex, human sacrifice and black magic and turns from the hunter to the hunted, with blow dart-shooting killers of uncertain gender on his trail. Even dwarves and the Ramayana provide cameos.

In fact, all the standard ghouls of the Bangkok night make an appearance, from psychotic ladyboys to flesh-eating monitor lizards. The writing is more fluid and assured than in Newman’s other novel, Bangkok Express, and Dylan’s journey through a world so rancid that the grime almost oozes through the screen – if one were to read the e-book edition of Red Night Zone – never falters. The circumstances of this particularly tragic reality are well explored, occasionally too deeply.

The heart of Newman’s literary mission – the crossing of Beat-style writing and observations of Thailand’s turgid world of sexpats – is not as obvious a concept as it may sound. The seedy Thai underworld is easy to describe and difficult to bring to life. Exuberant gaudiness and total degradation, detachment and vast suffering are opposites intrinsic to the Bangkok reality yet difficult to convey without either descending into tabloid journalism styles or out-and-out sleaze. Newman, by looking back to the Beats and the mass paperback culture of the ’40s and ’50s, is just far enough away from depravity to sail his ship. For the most part his observations on the monstrous are spot on, though his notion that the foreign Johns are the greater victims in the sordid death-sex-life dance that moves along the streets of downtown Bangkok will not be palatable to all readers. One presumes that Newman doesn’t care. The course is charted, there’s wind in the sails and Joe Dylan is likely to revisit the Zone somewhere near you soon. He will just slip into a barstool and turn his head and the chapter will start something like this: ‘The Nazi bargirl lit a cigarette and asked for a drink.’

Of course she did.

Red Night Zone, by James Newman, is available for Kindle now on Amazon.co.uk priced $4.95.

Paper offerings

Max Quinlan is a PI on the trail of a shady Australian businessman who’s gone to ground in Southeast Asia. Quinlan, a half-Vietnamese, half-Australian ex-cop, has only recently taken up the detective mantle but he quickly becomes embroiled in post-war shenanigans in a 1996 Phnom Penh that is populated by shady characters, both foreign and local. He teams up with a Cambodian journalist and trawls back in time, through the Untac years, the long civil war, the genocide and the Killing Fields, the Vietnamese liberation and the ensuing civil war.

Quinlan is a contradictory guy, an ex-copper who blushes when spoken to by an Asian woman but can’t get his clothes off quick enough with a girl from Central America. He is in almost-denial of his Asian heritage and he absorbs Cambodia’s tragic history from a number of sources like a sponge without ever falling into the cynicism one might expect from his kind.

There is plenty of action in Ghost Money (the title refers to the sheets of paper or paper crafts burnt as ancestral offerings in Chinese tradition), especially in the second half of the book, as Quinlan edges closer to Cambodia’s heart of darkness, the nexus between a beleaguered Khmer Rouge and shameless foreign businessmen – the last game in town, in this instance Pailin, a last Khmer Rouge hold-out near the Thai border, at the time an independent economic zone that financed itself by selling gem stones and offering every vice known to man, precisely the kind of thing the Cambodian revolution had tried to eradicate only a couple of decades earlier.

Writing a crime novel set in this sad and violent Cambodia without delving into the country’s extreme history seems impossible. Nette knows his shit when it comes to the bloody convolutions of the Southeast Asian kingdom and spins a gripping yarn of greed and madness in the late 20th century. While feeding the reader with the horrors of our time, he also finds the space to skillfully reward us with the conventions of the genre – memorable femmes fatale, effective bad guys (not just one), fast action and lively dialogue. Quinlan, our man in Cambodia, beaten and pushed, cornered and outgunned, takes it all in his stride, ready for a sequel to Ghost Money, apparently.

Ghost Money, by Andrew Nette, is available now from Amazon.com as an eBook for $1.15.

Manga, anime and cosplay: everything you need to know

Manga are meant to be read back to front, right to left. If you open a typical shojo like a regular book, you’re likely to see a note saying: “Stop! You are going the wrong way!” The idea is that it’s “a completely different reading experience”, as one popular series, Othello, explains on its first (that is, last) page.

The Chinese characters used to write the word manga in Japanese can be translated as ‘whimsical drawings’. The word first came into common usage in the late 18th century with the publication of Santō Kyōden’s picturebook Shiji no yukikai.

Shojo comics (manga for girls) have become one of the hottest markets in the book business. The genre has been called ‘big eyes save the world’ because of its predilection for girls with saucer-shaped eyes and supernatural powers.

While the earliest known Japanese animation dates to 1917, the characteristic anime style developed in the 1960s – most notably with the work of Osamu Tezuka, considered by many ‘the god of manga’.

On October 31 in 2006, ‘cosplay’ was declare Urban Word of the Day by urbandictionary.com, which defines it thus: “Literally ‘Costume Play.’ Dressing up and pretending to be a fictional character (usually a sci-fi, comic book or anime character).

Yuichiro ‘Jienotsu’ Nagashima, one of Japan’s top-ranked kickboxers, makes all his appearances for K-1 dressed as different female anime characters, accompanied by cosplaying girls.

When choosing your cosplay character, take time to study their mannerisms and be prepared to pose for camekos (‘cosplay photographers’).

Make sure you’re at the right cosplay convention: no self-respecting Doraemon wants to find themselves shoulder to shoulder with Stormtroopers.

Big in Japan

Sailor Moon stomps around in knee-high boots with five-inch platform heels. She has her own TV show and sings horrible pop songs. In strict anime proportion, this ‘magical girl’ boasts boobs the size of volleyballs and eyeballs the size of compact discs – and if you were 16 again, you’d probably want to date her or even be her.

Such is the awesome power of Japanese cartoon culture, which is finally finding a foothold here in Phnom Penh. Four months after the Japanese Embassy hosted the country’s first cosplay party at the Cambodia-Japanese Friendship Kizuna Festival, what claims to be the city’s first manga/anime/cosplay cafe is poised to open its doors in Golden Sorya Mall.

Here, among the comics, films, costumes and plastic figurines, entry into a fantastical realm is for sale – a realm Japan, notorious for its restrictive culture, has excelled in exporting to the wider world. In 2006, according to the Japan External Trade Organisation, manga sales in France and Germany totalled more than $212 million, making Europe the largest consumer of manga outside Japan. Manga versions of both the Bible and Shakespeare were launched by British publishers in 2007 and by 2009 anime clubs had spread to every continent. Two years ago, a search entry ranking by China’s biggest search engine revealed that ‘Naruto’ had been searched for more than 15 million times. Today, The Manga Guide series, on school subjects such as statistics, electricity and molecular biology, is a big hit for making science easy to swallow.

As the Washington Post noted at the turn of the 21st century, “In the modern commerce of a vinylised culture, it’s hard to know for certain whether we tell the Japanese what to do or they tell us. Lately the dialogue has collapsed giddily into a driving, sonic beat and the war whoops of mutant, cartoon samurai. It snuggles up to us with names like Pikachu.”

After years of waiting on the fringe of the sci-fi/fantasy universe, the world of Japanese animation – ranging from Pokemon to the blatantly pornographic – is now big with the neo-nerds. From roots in the explosion of artistic creativity in post-Occupation Japan, it has grown to support a more-than-$6-billion-a-year industry in the US, where manga sales increased at a rate unprecedented in the publishing industry – 350% from $60 million in 2002 to $210 million in 2007 – before the economy began shrivelling in 2008.

“Manga is very popular now not just in Japan but around the world,” says Kenji Hozawa, the former insurance worker behind the new cafe. “I have been reading manga since I was a little boy, but they are not just for children.” He hands me a 1986 copy of Buddha, by Osamu Tezuka – the artist’s unique interpretation of the life of the founder of Buddhism. The cover of another comic book, which could be a public service broadcast from 1950s Britain, reads simply: The Good Housewife.

It could be worse. Manga’s highly sexualised nature can be downright seedy, if not illegal. In 2007, 13 comics – including Rape Me In My School Uniform and Paedophile’s Banquet II – were branded ‘harmful books’ by the Kyoto Prefecture for featuring excessive sexual acts involving girls under the age of 13.

Anime and manga also tend to perpetuate negative images of daily life in Japan, according to International Manga Award winner Madeleine Rosca, an Australian artist and author: “Japan comes across as a bit scary culturally – terribly formal and deeply strict,” she told the Wall Street Journal in 2007. “Most of the stories we get tend to be stereotypes showing heavy workloads and strictness and a super-adherence to tradition.”

As if to underscore the muted horror, there is a caste of Japanese youth called hikikomori: mostly young men who lock themselves away in their bedrooms for years at a time. Fearful of society’s expectations, they retreat instead into a world of fantasy. “That’s why I want to open this cafe, because there are some young people who would otherwise lock themselves away alone,” says Kenji. He nods sagely. “I want them to come together; get to know each other over a rented anime movie or a manga comic.”

Patrick Samnang Mey is the author of graphic novel Eugenie, a title Kenji is helping enter into this year’s International Manga Award. “I do like the Manga style of animation,” Patrick says. “I started to draw ‘seriously’ when I saw some episodes of Saint Seiya as a child. I’d say that my style is a blend between Japanese manga style and American comics. I am a child of globalisation, after all. I think that young Cambodians will like manga, but everything comes down to money. Will there be enough Cambodians spending money on something related to culture? I’m not sure, but I think that it’s worth trying – and he’s the only one to do it in Phnom Penh.”

WHO: The wildly imaginative
WHAT: Manga Samurai Cafe
WHERE: Golden Sorya Mall, Street 51
WHEN: From June 20
WHY: Manga are “like the release of the id” – Frederik L Schodt, author of Dreamland Japan: Writings On Modern Manga

Breaking the law

Rules, as we all know, were made to be broken. Especially rules that are outdated, outmoded and outrageous. Surely no one ever truly intended men and women to live under the yoke of such despotism as the Indonesian decree that anyone caught masturbating can be decapitated? Or the law that in France one cannot name a pet pig Napoleon? Or the one where, in the UK, a pregnant woman can relieve herself in a place of her choosing, even in a policeman’s helmet? Actually sir, let that particular law of the land remain!

But the point is that there comes a time in every nation’s evolution when its rules and laws should be reassessed. Picked apart and re-made, if not broken. This is essentially the task that author, Fulbright scholar and grumpy feminist punk Anne Elizabeth Moore set a group of young Cambodian women when she asked them to rewrite the Chbap Srey (‘Women’s Law’). The result of this complicated, complex and at times completely hilarious exercise is New Girl Law, published in March: Moore’s docu-memoir of how 32 Cambodian girls imagined a better world and a better set of rules for generations of women to come.

For those not versed in its teachings, the Chbap Srey is quite simply Cambodia’s codification of idealised femininity. Literally translated as ‘Women’s Law’, the Chbap lays out an age-old set of behavioural principles by which good girls should live: obedience, inferiority, pliability, passivity. Sound familiar? Moore is quick to point out that these “virtues” are hardly unknown to women worldwide; all Cambodia did was inscribe them into an actual factual rulebook instead of inculcating ladies by even more sinister means. Taylor Swift’s lyrics, for example.

So why, I hear you right-on sisters wail, why bother to rewrite the Chbap Srey at all if it’s as bad as Taylor Swift? Why not just chuck the old law out wholesale and start the feminist revolution? Why would a riot grrrl like Moore fanny around writing a book about making sexism a little bit more palatable?

The answer in fact lies in one of Moore’s greatest strengths: her refusal to bring a moralistic sense of rectitude to bear on Cambodia. Hailing from a punk-feminist background, she does not adopt the stance that the West is some sort of idyll when it comes to women’s rights. New Girl Law is structured as a series of collaborative debates between Moore and her young female charges on how best to strengthen women socially and legislatively in the real world, Cambodia today. The author is fully aware of her home nation’s shortcomings, historical and contemporaneous, which enables her to steer clear of the NGO saviour narrative. Nicholas Kristof and Somaly Mam, take a lesson.

Of course, this refusal to moralise to the 32 women whom she challenged to rewrite the Chbap Srey means that Moore had to compromise. The 20 resultant ‘Girl Laws’ contain some edicts which read a trifle oddly to Western feminists: the seemingly androcentric “Girls should be brave enough to make eye contact with and speak to boys,” or the passive-sounding “Be patient.”

Musing on patience, Moore told the Phnom Penh Post: “I actually think that my body of work and history of being in the world presents a pretty clear view that patience is always bad and so when it was sort of presented to me as not only the most important thing but as the foundational thing from which we will build this project together, I was sort of like: ‘Oh, okay.’”

These may not sound like the words of a woman in the throes of making big compromises, but bear in mind that for Moore they are probably a big deal. She is after all an author capable of writing “men greeted each other loudly in congratulations, probably just for being men, I didn’t know”. Now, the ladies of The Advisor are not averse to a spot of feminist bovver ourselves from time to time, but that stuff smacks of the First Wave rather hard.

These are tiny little niggles, though. New Girl Law is, get ready for it, an important book. It’s important not just because it’s funny and warm and thought-provoking, but because through it you hear the voices of young women in the developing world. Advocating for themselves, asking for their rights, breaking the rules. These are voices that are normally silenced. The scope of New Girl Law’s success can be gleaned by the fact that it ran up against four years worth of publication and distribution problems in the US: “modes of censorship”, in Moore’s terms. If The Man tried to censor it, you punks know it must be good.

WHO: Anne Elizabeth Moore and 32 future women leaders
WHAT: New Girl Law: Drafting a Future for Cambodia
WHERE: Bookshops across Cambodia
WHEN: Now
WHY: Rules were made for breaking. Especially sexist ones (this is not a joke)

History and Tragedy

Bringing peace to Cambodia was never going to be easy. The country had suffered massive US bombing during the Vietnam War; a right-wing coup by General Lon Nol in 1970 which unseated Prince Norodom Sihanouk, and a civil war in which the radical Khmer Rouge had triumphed – resulting in the deaths of more than one million Cambodians from starvation, persecution and murder in the Killing Fields. In 1978 another invasion followed, this time by the Vietnamese. Then, in 1991, came nearly 16,000 soldiers under the command of Lieutenant-General John Sanderson of Australia, plus 3,359 police officers from 45 developed and developing countries ranging from Austria and Bulgaria to Morocco, Kenya, Argentina, Malaysia and Canada. The United Nations Transitional Authority on Cambodia (Untac) “was a peacekeeping mission, not a peacemaking mission,” says Maurits van Pelt, an attorney who ran Medecins sans Frontieres in Cambodia from 1989 to 2000. “The mandate of Untac was not to forcibly disarm; it was to organise disarmament: voluntary disarmament, as had been agreed. But then if one faction did not disarm then the other did not disarm either and the process was stuck.” And stuck it was. Untac failed to disarm the factions. It also failed to make the Cambodian People’s Party relinquish power when it lost the 1993 elections. As historian David Chandler writes in his 1996 book Facing The Cambodian Past: “What had happened was very strange and very moving: for the first time in Cambodian history, millions of Khmer had voted freely and fairly and a majority had opposed an armed, incumbent regime. In a sense, the vote was a massive statement rejecting politics as usual—the tragedy of Cambodian history—and proposing something different: peace and quiet, for example.” This month, which marks 20 years since Untac oversaw the 1993 assembly, the Australian Embassy is presenting an exhibition of stills from the era, including a collection by acclaimed conflict photographer Tim Page.

WHO: Historians
WHAT: Untac photo exhibition
WHERE: Meta House, Sothearos Blvd.
WHEN: From 6pm May 23
WHY: The tragedy of Cambodian history on camera

 

Stranger than fiction

For decades, the Powers That Be have flip-flopped on Angkor Wat being one of the Seven Wonders of the World almost as much as the Rock ‘N’ Roll Hall of Fame has on the inclusion of Iggy and The Stooges. But John Shors, author of historical novels about the Taj Mahal and the Great Wall of China, has no doubt as to its value. 

Despite having more than two million foreign visitors last year; an Angelina Jolie movie shot among its ruins; its likeness immortalised in a video game and a Texan thrash metal band now bearing its name, Angkor Wat’s appearance in Shors’ new title represents the first time the temple has served as the setting for a novel.

Temple of a Thousand Faces takes places in the 12th century, the height of the Khmer Empire. Because so little is known about this time, Shors had to supplement scant historical documents – such as A Record of Cambodia by 13th century Chinese diplomat Zhou Daguan – with impressions from his trips to Cambodia and his own imagination (the latter he stimulated by surrounding himself with photographs of the temple’s bas reliefs while he wrote).

Central to the main plot is the year 1177, a time when the Angkorean Empire was at the height of its powers. When Cham King Jaya Indravaraman invades the temples, the Khmer ruler Jayavaraman VII and his wife Jayarajadevi are forced into hiding in the surrounding jungle while they raise the necessary army to reclaim their kingdom. The remaining characters, all of whom are fictitious, were inspired by Shors’ interactions with the Cambodian people during his time in the country. One, he tells the reader in an interview at the end of the book, “embodies the characteristics of the women I met in Cambodia: strong, clever, witty, hospitable”.

In addition to the strong prince, his mystical wife and the Cham king, the book follows a Cham warrior who is torn between his loyalty to Indravaraman and his love for a Khmer woman. His conflict adds shades of grey to something that would otherwise be in danger of becoming a black and white melodrama. Also figuring prominently is a fishing and trading family whose struggle illustrates how such wars affected the peasant stock at the time and, more importantly, how they responded.

Reflecting the beauty and splendour of Angkor Wat, Shors’ third-person narration reads like a poet’s description of the jungles, the temples and the hearts of each character. Most all of the characters speak like philosophers. Even Boran, the fisherman, has this to say to his sons: “…war is vile, like a carcass in the water. It corrupts the pure. It maims the innocent… when the fighting starts, when the poor drench the earth with their blood, the rich will stand ready to seize whatever hasn’t been destroyed. That’s the nature of war.” Some things, it seems, never change.

Running throughout are themes of reincarnation, Buddhism and Hinduism, love and death. At more than 500 pages, Temple of a Thousand Faces is as epic as the Bayon statues which bear the face of its protagonist. And given how Shors condenses narration into prose like a Zen scribe, those pages are not thin. Altruistically enough, a portion of the book’s proceeds go towards the Jayavaraman VII Children’s Hospital in Siem Reap.

Temple of a Thousand Faces, by John Shors, is available at Monument Books priced at $15.

 

A criminal novel

Come with us now on a journey through time and space to the nethers of the crime-fiction cosmos. Suspend your disbelief and enter a world in which men are men, women are available and moustaches are the ultimate phallic symbol. Crack open a copy of The Cambodian Book of the Dead.

Tom Vater’s second crime novel, scheduled to be republished in June, has more layers than an onion and might leave you feeling similarly lachrymose. The year is 2001 and German Maier – ex-war reporter, current private investigator, life-long ladies man – is in Cambodia to convince the heir to a coffee empire to return home to Hamburg. Things get complicated when Maier gets involved with gangsters; ex-girlfriends; teenage girl assassins, Khmer Rouge generals and finally the Waffen SS, as our hard-boiled hero finds himself in a post-Apocalypse Now nightmare writing a Nazi war criminal’s biography while off his chops on amphetamines. And there you were thinking all disgraced Nazis ended up sunning themselves in Argentina (nota bene: factually, you’d be correct).

If it sounds like there’s a lot going on, you’re right: there is. But what’s sadly absent is a narrative arc on which to hang all these marvellous events and characters. The main plot sags as characters are swallowed up in the historical layers called into play by Vater; it could be a nice conceit to use shadows of conflicts past to augment the horror of Cambodia’s recent history, but it would have to be done with teleology rather than a trowel. Characters and storylines about which we want to know more are left frustratingly underdeveloped, and we’re left more knowledgeable about Maier’s boozing habits than we are about the case.

Which brings us to the case. “A strange case,” muses Maier in a moment of meta-textual angst. “A case without a crime.” Well, call me old-fashioned but I like my crime fiction to contain at least a modicum of crime. The fact that Maier’s PI assignment amounts to little more than babysitting a dull German through a protracted gap year does little to help the book’s lack of narrative propulsion. Crime fiction lore dictates that there must be two narrative lines: one leads the reader forward, as we wonder will our detective hero solve this dastardly murder; the other leads us backwards, as we wrack our brains for the killer’s motivation at the time the fatal blow was struck. Vater does not give us a good murder, man-eating sharks and all, until almost halfway through his novel and by that point both Maier and Dear Reader may be too drunk to care.

All this is a shame because Vater is excellent at capturing snapshots of the seedier side of Cambodia, creating a perfect backdrop for a noir-ish novel. The Kingdom is perfectly, utterly made for the crime-fiction genre: noir, hard-boiled, scandi noir all demand certain elements which Cambodia has in spades. Promise of violence? Check. Organised crime? Check. Institutionalised corruption? Check. Sex and death around every street corner? Well, possibly not the corners in BKK, but you never know.

The Cambodian Book of the Dead revels in this murky under-gusset, containing depictions of Heart of Darkness and Riverside realistic enough to make your toes curl. Rendering the seamy underbelly of the city, and human nature in general, seems right up Vater’s alleys and his sketches are hugely enjoyable for anyone familiar with Phnom Penh’s urban dystopia (hey, we’ve all been there, Reaksmey Burger).

There is potential for a great crime-fiction novel to be written about Cambodia; it could even be written by Tom Vater, an experienced Asia hand with numerous publications to his name. But you don’t have to be a super-sleuth to work out that The Cambodian Book of the Dead isn’t it.

WHO: Writer Tom Vater and a load of stiffs
WHAT: The Cambodian Book of the Dead
WHERE: Cambodia and Thailand with Exhibit A Publishers
WHEN: June
WHY: You need something to read in Snooky

 

Black as phnom penh nights

‘Master of Suspense’ Alfred Hitchcock famously noted that “Mystery is an intellectual process… but suspense is essentially an emotional process.” Phnom Penh Noir tackles both as it steers us through the seamy underbelly of a city that is seemingly all underbelly.

Noir, as a genre, cops an attitude of cynical detachment, a jaded worldview and an obsession with crime. All of these are things easily found among the flotsam and jetsam of foreigners who pass through Cambodia’s capital. With this and the city’s troubled recent past in mind, Southeast Asian publishing house Heaven Lake Press put together a compilation of Noir crime stories set locally.

The two worst things a book can do are make readers perform so many mental gymnastics that they find it more difficult than rewarding, and make readers lose brain cells with its vapidity. Phnom Penh Noir occupies a satisfying middle ground: thrilling crime tales are peppered with hard-won insights into local culture and history.

The book is made up of 14 stories as diverse in length as they are in subject matter. Love and Death at Angkor follows a young man taken in by a cult who practices Hindu sex magic in Bantaey Srey temple; if David Foster Wallace’s work ‘makes the head throb heart-like’, this makes the sacral chakra buzz brain-like. Meanwhile, Andrew Nette’s Khmer Riche deals with “[t]he classic bandit capitalist that half of Asia’s wealth was founded on” in a gripping tale that shines a flashlight into a world few of us will ever set foot in.

But the most horrifying tale is Hell in the City by young Khmer author Suong Mak. It isn’t horrific in a b-horror-movie-shock-value kind of way, but more in a what-I’m-talking-about-here-is-completely-serious-and-I-need-you-to-feel-every-second-of-it kind of way. Rightly so, dealing as it does with sexual violence in Khmer culture.

Setting itself apart by not taking place in the present day is Richard Rubenstein’s Sabbatical Term. It follows a Western journalist who’s one of the few foreigners allowed access to the Khmer Rouge regime. His falling in love with a top level official as well as the regime’s Communist ideology leaves him blind to the horror unfolding around him until it’s almost too late.

What the stories suffer from most is a sort of forced psychological machismo (only one contributor is female) which makes it hard to take seriously. Only a few of the authors are guilty of this but when they screw this up, they reinforce the absolute worst of the ‘Southeast Asia playground’ mentality. Take for example this sentence from Fires of Forever: “Not the sunburned tourists getting on that allegedly air-conditioned bus to go sightseeing at the pile of skulls in the Killing Fields for an inoculation of ignoble history that lets them justify their trip here and the coming night in bars where blowjobs from smooth-skinned black-haired beauties are always only a few dollars more.”

Some of the insights that pepper the stories feel like things creepy bar flies will tell you unsolicited. In Rebirth, author Neil Wilford speaks of “the walk of shame in the harsh morning light” and how whores “never look the same then, especially at the ATM”.

In spite of occasional cringe-inducing outbursts, Phnom Penh Noir is a worthwhile read that entertains and enlightens as it takes you through the many facets of a city you thought you knew so well. If you’re not careful, you just might learn something – even if that something is that Phnom Penh really is all seamy underbelly.

 

Phnom Penh Noir, edited by Christopher G Moore, is available at Monument Books on Norodom Boulevard for $16 and at

phnompenhnoir.com.