Draft:The Constant Companion Tales

  • Comment: All of these references were written before the stories, they can't cover them. Stuartyeates (talk) 18:15, 28 November 2023 (UTC)
  • Comment: You cannot use Wikipedia as a source. It may be helpful to use sources from the target page instead. Hey man im josh (talk) 12:48, 24 November 2023 (UTC)

The Constant Companion Tales is a series of horror stories written by Salina Christmas. It's been serialised on Amazon Kindle as an e-book series since September 2022. The chapters are collected and published as paperback. Two paperbacks have been published so far: The Keeper Of My Kin and A Request For Betrayal.

Synopsis

Setting

The story follows the journey of the protagonist, Sarah Raden, who discovers her family's dark history of black magic and witchcraft that resurfaced during the tumultuous times of war and conflict. The story begins when she first discovers, at the age of nine in 1984, the existence of a demon servant called 'the constant companion'. As she progresses into adulthood, she learns the full scale of the family legacy. The story jumps back and forth within various timelines set in World War Two, the Cold War and the present time. The events take place at various locations in Southeast Asia, East Asia and Europe.

Plot

Part One: The Red-Haired Gurkhas

A ghost appears at a former British military camp in Kluang, Johor, Malaysia, just as the Commonwealth War Graves Commission exhumes the remains of fallen World War 2 soldiers. The soldiers currently living at the camp insist it's the ghost of a British army officer because of the uniform that he wears. The disturbance caused by the ghost causes the constant companion to re-appear, to the dismay of the Raden family.

Part Two: The Tiger-Man and His Constant Companion

An elderly relative reveals to Sarah and her brother Adam what their family 'keeper' – a were-tiger – did to the enemy soldiers during World War Two. A boy soldier, a Japanese conscript, was the only survivor that survived the massacre. The incident almost claimed the life of one of their relatives who lost control over the fearsome family servant.

Part Three: The Night of the Flying Blades

During their school break, the Raden children learn more about family magic and the past. They discover that in the 1950s, their maternal grandmother's younger brother was kidnapped and murdered by Communist insurgents as a revenge attack. In retaliation, the family turned to the dark side to deploy the flying blades on their enemies.

Part Four: The Brotherhood of the Tiger-Men

In the 1960s, Indonesia is in confrontation with the newly independent Malaysia. The Raden family, being Javanese, is asked to betray their new country for their ancestral homeland. Young Private Raden is sent to the frontline in Borneo to defend his country. He encounters a were-tiger whilst patrolling the frontline, which is not theirs but the servant of another. He's not sure if the were-tiger is a friend or a foe.

Part Five: A Truce Made In Blood

By 1964, the Indonesian and Malaysian sides are desperate for peace but there are so many ghosts in the way. During the confrontation, spells and curses are deployed to one another, whilst covert peace talks are taking place at discrete locations. The high-ranking officials discovered to have participated in the peace talks are caught and executed, pushing Sarah's grandfather to enlist the help of their demon servant for protection. The story ends with peace, hard-earned by all the protagonists and antagonists involved. The open ending, however, implies that the ghostly servant of the Raden family is dormant for the time being, undisturbed by the temporary peace of mind the family enjoys.

Publication

The story is written by Salina Christmas, with the creative direction by Zarina Holmes. The Keeper Of My Kin, the first paperback comprising Parts One, Two and Three, was published on 18 August 2023. The second paperback, a sequel titled A Request For Betrayal, comprising Parts Four and Five, was published on 11 November 2023.

Literary reading

Timeline

The work uses timelines and points of view as key literary devices to jump from one period to another – past and present – and also to represent the inner worlds of the characters who are embroiled in situations created by the conflicts mentioned in the series.

Point of view

The story structure is that of a story within a story, popular in Eastern literary structure such as One Thousand and One Nights. Depending on periods and scenarios, the points of view of the narrator switch from that of a nine-year-old child to a precocious teenager, and to a cynical and highly mindful adult. Each method is deployed to gradually reveal, throughout the series, of the mystery behind the family’s obsession or fear of their own inherited ghostly servants.

Distancing mechanism

Following the structure of an epic fantasy, although at a smaller scale, the work deploys multiple points of view from various characters when describing a particular horrific event involving the demons and massacres carried out by warring factions. Second- or third-person narration is used as a distancing mechanism in informing the reader some aspects of the events that can be acceptably told, rather than depicting the situations as gore.

Metaphor

The demons, depicted as family inheritance, are symbolic of the power controlled by the Raden family, natives of the land, to ward off invaders. More often than not, they lose control of the demons, who go on to massacre innocent people unnecessarily. It’s a metaphor of the uses and the dangers of power driven by ideologies or nationalistic sentiments, an indirect commentary on the socio-political situations during World War Two and the Cold War that divided the protagonists and the antagonists against their will.

Anthropological reading

The concept behind the character design of the ‘constant companion’ is derived from a particular Eastern or Asian belief of the demon as an inheritance or a servant that is passed down from one generation to the next. One instance is the qareen. Similar phenomenon was recorded by anthropologist and British civil servant R. J. Wilkinson in his 1935 paper, Early Indian Influence in Malaya in his observation of the ‘saka’. The were-tiger is one such example, although this is constantly dismissed as superstition. Another prominent civil servant in Malaya, Sir Hugh Clifford, a former governor, wrote a fiction called The Were-Tiger in 1916, said to be inspired by an account of a massacre deemed to be supernatural in nature. R. O. Windstedt’s 1951 book, The Malay Magician: Being Shaman, Saiva and Sufi, which mentions shamanic practices using the flying blade, also serves as an inspiration for the series.

The same notion of troublesome demonic inheritance is also prevalent in cultures throughout East Asia, popularised in modern literary works such as the Onmyōji novel series by Japanese author Baku Yumemakura.

The Buddhist perception of demons is that they’re not necessarily the devils in the biblical sense, but rather, symbolic of the functions in life, and like sentient beings, are capable of achieving enlightenment. This concept also influences the character design of one of the constant companions in the series, the Tiger-Man, a ruthless entity that is somehow capable of empathising with the oppressed, despite its murderous nature.

By exploring this concept, the author, herself an anthropologist, proposes that Asian gothic or horror is distinct from Western myth-making, and that the genres it inspires could stand on their own, as seen in many book-to-screen adaptations. However, the literary structure in which she frames and presents the series is Western and in English, which is unique because many prominent Asian horror series are published in their native languages.

Historical background

The series highlights the involvement of Commonwealth troops in the formation of Malaysia, in a period taking place between 1938 and 1965. The horror events are based on popular folklores that surfaced during this period. The plot, however, is loosely based on historical events such as:

  • The defeat of the British and Indian regiments to the Japanese in Malaya (1941).
  • The fall of Singapore (1942).
  • The assassination of Sir Henry Gurney (1953).
  • The Kepong Hill massacre of policemen and their families (1953).
  • Sir Gerald Templer's policy of 'the battle for hearts and minds' in Malaya (1953).
  • The confrontation between Indonesia and Malaysia (1963–1966).
  • The assassination of high-ranking Indonesian military officers at Lubang Buaya (1963).
  • The peace treaty between Indonesia and Malaysia (1966).
  • The Hat Yai Treaty that marked the end of the Communist insurgency in Malaysia (1989).

References

[1][2][3][4][5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11]

  1. ^ "The Keeper Of My Kin (Barnes & Noble)".
  2. ^ "The Keeper Of My Kin (Waterstones)".
  3. ^ "A Request For Betrayal (Barnes & Noble)".
  4. ^ "The Constant Companion Tales (Amazon Kindle)". Amazon UK.
  5. ^ "Salina Christmas author (Goodreads)".
  6. ^ "Hock-Soon Ng, A. (2012). Monsters in the Literary Traditions of Asia: A Critical Appraisal. In: Picart, C.J.S., Browning, J.E. (eds) Speaking of Monsters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York". doi:10.1057/9781137101495_7.
  7. ^ "Balmain, C. East Asian Gothic: a definition. Palgrave Commun 3, 31 (2017)".
  8. ^ "Sutherland, G. H. (2023) Demons and the Demonic in Buddhism. Oxford Bibliographies".
  9. ^ "Wilkinson, R. J. Early Indian Influence in Malaysia. Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 13, no. 2 (122), 1935, pp. 1–16. JSTOR". JSTOR 41559837.
  10. ^ "Ng, Andrew Hock-Soon. Malaysian Gothic: The Motif of Haunting in K.S. Maniam's 'Haunting the Tiger' and Shirley Lim's 'Haunting.' Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, vol. 39, no. 2, 2006, pp. 75–87". JSTOR 44030187.
  11. ^ Winstedt, R. O. (2024). Winstedt, R.O. (1951). The Malay Magician: Being Shaman, Saiva and Sufi (1st ed.). Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781003463566. ISBN 978-1-003-46356-6.
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