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"How many more young women had gone the same way
after their deaths, unnoticed and unmourned?"
This story starts off as a police procedural, but with
more than a whiff of incense. Pearl Tang has gone missing after her
death, and her mother comes to Detective Inspector Chen in the hope of finally
laying her to rest. However, it's not Pearl's body which has gone
missing, but her spirit, captured on film in a ghost photograph. So
begins Liz Williams' Chinese ghost story. Although the setting is
slightly futuristic (in a new city called 'Singapore Three'), Williams'
travelling days does seem to have influenced this narrative. Liz Williams
certainly seems more than competent in writing about foreign cultures, and Chen
is just as vividly drawn as the Norse Olaffsson was in 'Blood Thieves'.
As in that tale, it seems that Liz Williams has a predilection for delving into
world mythology. I'm not really up to date with Chinese legends, but the
ghost trade here certainly seems to have some popish elements: the first thing Chen
does in the story is to light a stick of incense, and his most valuable defence
against diabolical attacks is his rosary. So it could be that Liz
Williams is referring obliquely to Singapore's colonial history by these
seemingly Western links.
Certainly, the world of the Chinese ghost story
has very rich soil. However, Liz Williams doesn't ever seem to follow
mythology blindly. In Liz Williams' prose, it's her plot which rules
supreme over the ancillary mystical element. Everything seems to be grounded
in the real world here; indeed, part of the plot revolves around the links that
Hell has with the world above, and Chen is not adverse to speaking to demons
via the telephone. It could be that Chen is a kind of Fox Mulder figure,
except that his police colleagues also believe in the demon domain - it's just
that they don't want to have anything to do with it. Indeed, it's
commented of Sergeant Ma that he could be prejudiced against demons. Liz
Williams also adds more than a touch of humour to the spooky intrigue,
especially concerning the links between Earth and Hell. The character of
the demon, with his all too willing resort to violence and his ready wit, could
have come straight out of Buffy. Having said that, there does appear to a
bit of a conservative note in Williams' resolution, especially since the ghost
trade could all too easily be associated with the current lamentable Asian
sex trade. Yet Liz Williams is an entertainer overall, and performs her
duty of confounding her audience's expectations indubitably well.
authortrek rating: 9/10.
Kevin Patrick Mahoney
'Adventures in the Ghost Trade' was published in Interzone number 154 April 2000.
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for a Liz Williams biography, bibliography, Liz Williams short stories, and
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