Creeping Shadows By Author Aruna Chakravarti

A teahouse in ancient China. A brothel in nineteenth-century Calcutta. A forest lodge in Bankura. An old mansion in Bangladesh. A university campus in present-day Delhi. Creeping Shadows moves across a huge span of time and place, and each of its thirteen stories starts out as an ordinary human drama before twisting, without warning, into something genuinely unsettling. At eighty-something, celebrated historical novelist Aruna Chakravarti - known for Jorasanko and The Mendicant Prince - steps deliberately outside her usual genre here, trading meticulous period research for stories that came, as she's said herself, straight from imagination. What emerges isn't the traditional Bengali ghost story full of petnis and shankchunnis; instead, Chakravarti is more interested in the ordinary turning strange - guilt, repression, and unresolved pasts creeping back into daily life, in a way reviewers have compared to Edgar Allan Poe or Hitchcock at his subtlest. Readers who like their horror psychological rather than gory, fans of literary ghost stories, and anyone who enjoys Bengal-set fiction with a dark undertone will find plenty to unsettle them here.