What’s more terrifying than a werewolf? Perhaps a man-eating weretiger! Yangzse Choo’s second novel, The Night Tiger, which came out last month, explores the Malaysian folklore surrounding harimau jadian—tigers who can take on the form of a man in order to get closer to their prey, almost the reverse of the werewolf myth. As in her first book, The Ghost Bride, Choo cleverly weaves together vivid depictions of Malaysia under British rule with a sense of magical realism that brings the region’s unique blend of cultures and beliefs to life.
The Night Tiger is a dual narrative, following the perspectives of two seemingly unconnected characters. Ren is a young Chinese houseboy charged with finding his former master’s severed finger and reuniting it with his body before his master becomes a restless ghost. Ji Lin is a young dressmaker moonlighting as a dancehall girl to pay her mother’s mahjong debts. When Ji Lin unexpectedly comes across a severed finger, she finds herself drawn into a tangled web of mysterious deaths, meddling ghosts, and black-market body parts.
One theme that runs through both The Night Tiger and The Ghost Bride is the relationship between dreams and death. In both books, the dead can communicate with the living through their dreams. In The Ghost Bride, the dead could control the setting of the dreams, constructing their surroundings to suit their wishes. In The Night Tiger, however, all of the dream conversations with the dead take place in a setting that resembles one of the local train stations. This choice reminded me of the King’s Cross Station scene in the seventh Harry Potter book, and the symbolic significance is much the same. The train station represents a sort of limbo between life and death, with one-way trains that will carry the soul toward a realm of more permanent death. Each of the characters face serious choices about whether to board a train or return to the land of the living, or in other cases, whether or not to stay at the station, waiting for their loved ones to join them in death.
An element that surprised me about the book was the way that a rather complex murder mystery is woven into the background of the plot. You’d think with bodies dropping left and right, that finding the culprit would be the central focus, but instead it serves as merely a high-tension backdrop to the main narratives about Ji Lin’s concerns for her future and Ren’s quest to find his master’s finger. Apart from moving the plot along, the murders also serve to reveal some deeply troubling flaws in the society in which Ren and Ji Lin live. One reason that the murders are never properly investigated is that the casual racism of the imperial authorities brush off the deaths of Malaysians as unimportant, while locals and foreigners alike give in to superstition and chalk the deaths up to mere unluckiness or supernatural intervention. In fact, Ji Lin and Ren uncover clues quite by accident most of the time, and at the end of the story, only the reader has all the answers about what really happened.
Whether you love mysteries, mythology, or deep social commentary, The Night Tiger has a little something for everyone. You can find it on sale now at your favorite retailer, or buy it online and support The Gothic Library in the process by clicking on this Bookshop.org affiliate link. Once you’ve read it, be sure to some back and share your thoughts in the comments!