Happy Birthday, Singapore! I was going to take today off, but I realised I actually had a Singlit review and decided that today would be the perfect day to post it… even if my review isn’t wholly positive.

I saw this book when the library was giving away books and decided to pick it up because I always have this vague sense that I should read more Singlit. And also, this book should theoretically be up my alley since it’s supposed to have supernatural and short-story realism (and also it’s quite heavily based on folktales).

Spoiler: it was not.

The first thing that caught my attention about Spectre is the odd formating choice. I’m used to seeing a space after each paragraph for nonfiction, and an indented first line with no space after the paragraph for fiction. Spectre has both an indented first line and a space after each paragraph, which looks a bit odd and makes me feel like they tried to pad this (thin) book out. Also, it made short lines of dialogue look really strange.

Formating issues aside, I think my main issue with Spectre is that while it generally has interesting premises, the characters are not fleshed out and dialogue is generally clunky/unrealistic. These feel like first versions of what could be longer stories.

Honey’s Story, the first story in the collection, made me particularly uncomfortable. It’s a bit like The Lovely Bones, as a Thai woman narrates what happens after her husband kills her. Unfortunately, the narrative style is… odd. Tay chooses to write in very broken English, no doubt like what she imagines most Thai people speak. It felt extremely stereotypical and unrealistic – I doubt a dead woman would choose to be speaking in her non-native language after death. More likely, she would be speaking in her native language and I’m sure she would be more eloquent than that! Plus, it felt like the only thing that marked her as Thai was this broken way of speaking and a mention of Chiang Mai/working in nightclubs and I was uncomfortable with that. I’m sure Tay wanted us to feel sympathy for the victim but the story was too simple and played too much on stereotypes.

My favourite stories in this collection were The Walls and Fast Food, 1979: Portrait of an Old Lady. I thought the characters were stronger here – they both feature elderly women who do not fit in and their sense of awkwardness and loneliness was palpable. The character building here was effective, though for The Walls I wasn’t a fan of the interludes by the other family members, those characters didn’t really jump to life from their short passages and I wasn’t sure what the point was. These stories were actually what I was hoping to read in the collection and it’s a pity that the rest of the stories only skimmed the surface of what could have been.

Overall, Spectre is a collection of short stories which have interesting premises but have been let down by its execution. I wish I liked it more because I really do want to be a big fan of Singlit!