About The Constant Companion Tales

Media information and literary overview of The Constant Companion Tales series.

Introduction

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 daughter of 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 2, 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 2. 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 of 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 great-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. Thus, the line between right and wrong was blurred.

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 of the protagonists and antagonists involved. The ghostly servant becomes dormant again, leaving the Raden family to enjoy their peace for the time being.

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 is deployed to gradually reveal, throughout the series, the mystery behind the family’s fear of their own inherited ghostly servants; the motif behind a particular action, or the history behind a pivotal incident.

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 the massacres carried out by warring factions. Second- or third-person narration is used as a distancing mechanism to inform the reader, in the most acceptable manner, of some gruesome aspects of certain events in the story.

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.

In the first novel, The Keeper Of My Kin, the Raden family uses the demon servants to annihilate the enemies: first, the foreigners – the Japanese soldiers – and soon after, the Communist insurgents who threaten their community. In the second novel, A Request For Betrayal, the Raden family uses the demon servants to turn on their own people, when Malaysia goes into war with Indonesia.

The tragedy lies in the Raden family’s inability to control the demon servants, an allusion to the Malay saying: “The weapon has eaten its master” (“Senjata makan tuan”).

The demons are a metaphor of the dangers of power driven by ideologies or nationalistic sentiments, an indirect commentary on the socio-political situations during World War 2 and the Cold War that divided the protagonists and the antagonists against their will.

Symbolism

Rice is the object used to symbolise the commonality found across Asian cultures, as illustrated in the final chapter of A Request For Betrayal. The conversation that Sarah has with her sisters Hagar and Maryam about the origin of the modern hybridised Malaysian rice – a crossbreed of japonica and indica varieties – alludes to the struggles and sacrifices that their country has gone through to achieve prosperity. The japonica variant was brought by the Japanese to stave off starvation in Malaya during World War 2. Unlike the traditional indica variant, this variant can be harvested twice a year instead of once a year. The manner of which the variant was implemented was through war – a most unwelcomed introduction – but the legacy it leaves behind revolutionised rice harvesting in Malaya.

Life and death intertwined in The Constant Companion Tales, with agents of destruction also acting as agents of creation. Rice, in this framing, symbolises hope and triumph over destruction.

Leitmotif

Water is used repeatedly throughout the series: to signal an ominous event and as a backdrop for battle scenes, especially in Part Three: The Night of the Flying Blades, and Part Five: A Truce Made In Blood. The author proposes that water, as a physical body, unites and separates the protagonists and the antagonists, as described in the confrontation story of Indonesia and Malaysia, which ends in peace. Water, or the reflection seen in the river, symbolises the mirror that reveals the truth to the characters, as illustrated in Part Four: The Brotherhood of the Tiger-Men, in which young Raden catches a glimpse of his own reflection and finally realises he has taken the shape of a tiger.

Anthropological reading

Troublesome inheritance: the transmission of generational identity and trauma

The concept behind the character design of the ‘constant companion’ is derived from a particular Far Eastern belief of the demon servant as an inheritance that is passed down from one generation to the next.

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. In popular culture, the concept of demonic servants is also featured in notable manga works such as Jujutsu Kaisen.

Another concept from the Near East can be found in a phenomenon called the qareen. However, the author’s inspiration is derived from historical sources such as the ‘saka’ phenomenon recorded by anthropologist and British civil servant R. J. Wilkinson in his 1935 paper, Early Indian Influence in Malaya. The were-tiger is one such example, though not mentioned by Wilkinson. Instead, Sir Hugh Clifford, the former governor of North Borneo, brings this to our attention in a fiction called The Were-Tiger, published 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, mentions shamanic practices using the flying blade, which also serves as an inspiration for the series.

The demonised ‘other’

The series is an exploration of demons and the demonised. The author invites the readers to compare the demons to the humans responsible for war atrocities with the question: who is worse? The monsters subjugated by humans to carry out their orders, or the humans who kill innocent people? It also looks at characters such as military conscripts and Communist insurgents, and asks: why are they in this situation and why do they do what they do? The first book, The Keeper Of My Kin, describes events that introduce the rupture in the social fabric during World War 2 and the Malaysian Emergency period. The second book, A Request For Betrayal, explains the tragic events that trip everyone into the situations they find themselves in.

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.

Another prevalent theme that runs through the series is that of concealment. The parents of Sarah, the protagonist, collude to conceal their family history and superstitious practices from their children in the name of modernisation. Upon piecing together the historical events told to her, it dawns on Sarah that the actors involved also collude in hiding the truth to protect their communities. The argument for social collusion here is that ignorance is bliss; no transgression exists if it doesn’t live in anyone’s memory.

But selective memory isn’t without its problems. Part Five: A Truce Made In Blood reveals the repercussions of the action – and inaction – of our protagonists in previous conflicts that lead them to the conundrum they face during the Malaysian-Indonesian confrontation in the 1960s.

Transcultural psychiatry: Psychosis, shame and the ethnic minority

In designing the characters of the Raden cousins – Javanese immigrants who fled the oppressive Dutch colonialism to British Malaya for a better life – the author borrows the concept of transcultural psychiatry learned from her time as a student under Professor Roland Littlewood.

In The Keeper Of My Kin, the madness that afflicts one of the cousins, Karno, is attributed to his inability to cope with the trauma of World War 2, as well as his experience as a new migrant. Being an ethnic minority trying to fit into an ethnic majority (a Javanese passing as a Malay), adds layers of complexity and corresponding mental stressors to the character of Karno. The were-tiger – the aforementioned metaphor – is the manifestation of the resulting psychosis.

In A Request For Betrayal, young Private Raden, a second-generation Javanese, is in pain to prove his loyalty to his new country, and to fit in with the soldiers he serves with. This becomes problematic as Malaysia and Indonesia plunge into a conflict, and Private Raden is finding himself having to go to war against his own people. As he progresses up the social ranks, Raden becomes a Captain and chooses to forego his Javanese identity and associated superstitions to become an educated, progressive army officer worthy of the new era.

The disruptive potential of the Asian Gothic

By exploring the ideas mentioned above, the author, herself an anthropologist, proposes that Asian gothic or horror challenges the stereotype of filial piety and parochialism so closely tied with the Asian identity. Asian Gothic 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 such as the anime. However, the literary structure in which she frames and presents the series is Western and in English. This is unique because many prominent Asian horror series are published in their native languages.

Asian Gothic for Asian audiences interrogates filial piety, and its opposite extreme, blind loyalty. Asian Gothic written in English invites the non-Asian audience into this conversation as a bystander.

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 Kalabakan massacre of soldiers in Tawau, Sabah, Borneo (1963).
The assassination of high-ranking Indonesian military officers at Lubang Buaya (1965).
The peace treaty between Indonesia and Malaysia (1966).
The Hat Yai Treaty that marked the end of the Communist insurgency in Malaysia (1989).

The universe

The wiki page explains more on the universe of The Constantly Companion Tales.

References

For more information, contact the author or her representative at this page.