Headcases (3)

The floating head goblin encountered throughout South-east Asia occurs in a much more Shinto-friendly sanitized form in Japanese folklore. No pus-dripping entrails here, no blood and childbirth, just an eerie flying head as described by Lafcadio Hearn in Kwaidan:

Gently unbarring the door, Kwairyo made his way to the garden, and proceeded with all possible caution to the grove beyond it. He heard voices talking in the grove; and he went in the direction of the voices, stealing from shadow to shadow, until he reached a good hiding-place. Then, from behind a trunk, he caught sight of the heads—all five of them—flitting about, and chatting as they flitted. They were eating worms and insects which they found on the ground or among the trees. 

Presently the head of the chieftain stopped eating and said, "Ah, that travelling priest who came tonight—how fat all his body is! When we shall have eaten him, our bellies will be well filled. I was foolish to talk to him as I did; it only set him to reciting the sutras on behalf of my soul. To go near him while he is reciting would be difficult, and we cannot touch him so long as he is praying. But as it is now nearly morning, perhaps he has gone to sleep. One of you go to the house and see what the fellow is doing."

Another head—the head of a young woman—immediately rose up and flitted to the house, lightly as a bat. After a few minutes it came back, and cried out huskily, in a tone of great alarm, "That travelling priest is not in the house. He is gone! But that is not the worst of the matter. He has taken the body of our chieftain; and I do not know where he has put it." 

At this announcement the head of the chieftain—distinctly visible in the moonlight—assumed a frightful aspect: its eyes opened monstrously; its hair stood up bristling; and its teeth gnashed. Then a cry burst from its lips; and, weeping tears of rage, it exclaimed, "Since my body has been moved, to rejoin it is not possible. Then I must die! And all through the work of that priest. Before I die I will get at that priest! I will tear him! I will devour him! And there he is behind that tree!—hiding behind that tree! See him—the fat coward!"

In the same moment the head of the chieftain, followed by the other four heads, sprang at Kwairyo. But the strong priest had already armed himself by plucking up a branch, and with that branch he struck the heads as they came, knocking them from him with tremendous blows. Four of them fled away. But the head of the chieftain, though battered again and again, desperately continued to bound at the priest, and at last caught him by the left sleeve of his robe. Kwairyo, however, as quickly gripped the head by its topknot, and repeatedly struck it. It did not release its hold; but it uttered a long moan, and thereafter ceased to struggle. It was dead. But its teeth still held the sleeve; and, for all his great strength, Kwairyo could not force open the jaws.

With the head still hanging to his sleeve he went back to the house, and there caught sight of the other four Rokuro-Kubi squatting together, with their bruised and bleeding heads reunited to their bodies. But when they perceived him at the back door all screamed, "The priest! the priest!" and fled through the other doorway out into the woods.

* * *

Notice that Hearn calls it a rokuro-kubi, rokuro being the Japanese word for a potter's wheel and kubi meaning neck. Technically (if folktales can ever be subject to technical analysis) the word rokuro-kubi ought to describe another Japanese goblin that sends out its head by night on the end of a long stretching neck, like Mister Fantastic, and the proper term for one of these things with a fully detachable head is nuke-kubi. I'm not sure that a Japanese storyteller would bother with the distinction, though. Hearn certainly didn't.

Less viscerally terrifying than the penanggalan this may certainly be, but I prefer it. Like a lot of Japanese folklore it's more dreamlike, less shlock-horrific and so far creepier. Hence it was the nuke-kubi that I used in Lords of the Rising Sun - as brilliantly illustrated here by Russ.

Dirk Lloyd shortlisted for Roald Dahl Prize

Here's an exciting bit of news that I've been keeping under my hat for a couple of weeks, but today it can be revealed. Dark Lord: The Early Years is one of six books shortlisted for this year's Roald Dahl Funny Prize.

(To digress: obviously it disgusts me to have to write the words "Funny Prize" but that's the name the organizers have given the thing. I console myself with the thought that Roald Dahl himself would shove them out the way and correct it to "Humour Prize" with big red pen, chortling derisively to himself all the while.)

Anyway, the important thing is that the genius of the book, which I believe is Jamie's greatest work to date, is being recognized. And if Roald Dahl himself were one of the judges I have no doubt it would win. As it is, we must rely on Dirk Lloyd's talents for self-promotion and social networking. I asked Dirk for a quote and he said:

"The Roald Dahl Funny Prize? Shouldn’t that read the Dirk Lloyd Funny Prize?"

So, in the bag then.

While opening Jamie's cage to throw him an extra scrap of rancid meat as a reward, it occurred to me that credit is also due to the wacky drawings of Scrawny Earth Girl (aka Freya Hartas), depicted here in the office where her father Leo and I work on our epic comic saga Mirabilis, wearing a jacket given to her by my wife Roz. Put like this, I guess it sounds like our lives are driven by the same kind of incestuous cronyism that pervades modern politics and business, only in our case without the vast wealth and the freebie honours.

I know I'm biassed, but Dark Lord really is one of the funniest books I've ever read. I was laughing out loud all the way through, and how many books can you say that about? Pick it up in the USA from October 2 at the link above, or in the UK on Amazon here.

Sky scraping

Big news tomorrow. Yes, it's this big, but the picture is a clue in another way too. Can't say more - too excited. Drop by tomorrow, when I'll have had a cuppa to steady my nerves.

A shark going forward

I'm used to the idea that most visitors to this blog are really only interested in Fabled Lands news, maybe with a side order of 1990s gamebooks - and hey, I'm not knocking it. It's nice to have your work appreciated, even if it is sixteen-year-old work. But I didn't retire or anything, and naturally I think I'm a better writer now than I was back then, so I hope the hardcore gamebook fans will allow me the occasional indulgence of talking about what I'm working on nowadays.

One such project is of course Frankenstein, which came out earlier this year on iPad and iPhone. I'm right now working with Spirit Entertainment (the new FL app developers) on Kindle and EPUB versions of that, which should be published by Profile Books this autumn. And next year there might even be a print edition - which is not easy, because this is an interactive novel rather than a gamebook, so telling the reader about the characters' degree of alienation or trust is not exactly conducive to the literary experience. But I'll see if I can figure something out.

And then there's my ongoing comics epic Mirabilis: Year of Wonders, created with Leo Hartas and Martin McKenna. This is my labour of love. The work that I would still do if I was stranded on a desert island with no one to read it.

Recently Mirabilis was released on the NOOK and in the iBookstore, but the important scoop du jour is that it's just out on Kindle and for this week only the first two issues are discounted down to - oh, absolutely free. Well, how about that. There's never been a better time to try it out. And if you like it, let me know. Writers are more like cats than sharks, you know. We like to be stroked.

Headcases (2)

Most gruesome of the disembodied heads of folklore is the spirit known variously throughout South-east Asia as the penanggalan (Malaysia), the leyak (Bali), the krasue (Thailand), the kasu (Laos) and the ap (Cambodia) - at least, in the unlikely eventuality that Wiki is to be believed. John D Gimlette, in Malay Poisons and Charm Cures, characterizes it as a disease-inducing spirit - "a horrible, partially disembowelled wraith from the lying-in room who comes to torment little children" - apparently taking his cue from Sir Hugh Clifford's description in his book In Court and Kampong:

"I had told them of the Pĕnangal, that horrible wraith of a woman who has died in child-birth, and who comes to torment small children, in the guise of a fearful face and bust, with yards of bloody trailing entrails flying in her wake; of that weird little white animal the Mati-ânak, that makes beast noises round the graves of children; and of the familiar spirits that men raise up from the corpses of babes who have never seen the light, the tips of whose tongues they bite off and swallow, after the child has been brought back to life by magic agencies."

The creature seems to be a sort of Oriental vampire, which during the day presents itself as a midwife but by night detaches its head from its body and flies around with its entrails dangling below it. In other (probably earlier) variants it makes no claim to humanity, but instead is a kind of harpy that, attracted by the sounds of a woman in labour, perches on the roof and makes a cacophonous screeching. The liquid that seems from its entrails can cause the newborn child to sicken and die. Or maybe it drinks the baby's or mother's blood. That's the wonderful thing about folklore; it's not a Monster Manual.

My HeroQuest book The Screaming Spectre was supposed to be titled The Singing Skull, except a suit at Hasbro thought that singing wasn't scary enough and skulls were too scary. Stolen heads still featured in the story, though, and as I chose South-east Asian folklore as inspiration for the gamebook section of the book, the penangga-lan inevitably made an appearance:

"A group of disembodied heads hang hovering in the air of the vestibule. Their eyes blaze greenly from deep-set white sockets and their long fangs are bared eagerly in anticipation of the blood-feast. But most ghastly of all is the tangle of slimy entrails which hangs from the stump of each severed neck, twitching and coiling like snakes as the disembodied heads circle around you."

Headcases (1)

While going over a lot of my old books in preparation for next year's gamebook initiative, I've been noticing what a lot of creepy disembodied heads I've used as monsters over the years. Funny, I never thought of it as a particular obsession of mine, but apparently it's been there as a hangnail in my subconscious all this time. This one is from Necklace of Skulls and is based on a real (and magnificently nightmarish) creature of Mesoamerican folklore, as described in this excerpt from Tobacco Use by Native North Americans: Sacred Smoke and Silent Killer, by Joseph C Winter:

'Tobacco acts to seal off the demon's transformation from its human form. For example, the Charcoal Cruncher might possess a woman who then detaches her head so that it can roam the forest at night, eating charcoal. The demon is supposedly trapped by putting tobacco, garlic, and salt (all "civilized" creations of mankind) on her severed head. Another local demon, the Split-faced Man, can be killed only when he is thoroughly saturated three times with tobacco, salt, and other ingredients.'

If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say this monster has the stamp of a debased deity about it, and therefore probably arose after the conquest of Mexico by the Spanish. If so, it wasn't a creature that a young warrior of the classic Maya period would fear to meet at night. But who knows? Here's how the thing is introduced in Necklace of Skulls:

'Nightcrawlers are disembodied heads that live in calabash trees and descend to glide through the air in the dead of night,' the fenman tells you. 'They find their way into houses through the roof, and can sometimes be heard crunching the charcoal beside the hearth. I myself once woke after a night of disturbing dreams to find my stock of firewood had mysteriously vanished.'

'These nightcrawlers are mischievous creatures, then,' you reply. 

He gives a snort of grim laughter. 'I prefer to think of them as steeped in evil, in view of the fact that they also smother babies.'

'I shall be sure to keep a weather eye out for flying heads,' you assure him. 

'Oh, they are more cunning than that! A night-crawler will sometimes latch onto a human neck, sinking tendrils into the host in the manner of a strangler fig taking root in another tree. In that guise, they may use trickery and guile to entice you off the road into the swamps.'

'Presumably the presence of two heads on a body is a sure giveaway, though?'

He shrugs as though this had never occurred to him. 'Salt is the only remedy,' he maintains. 'Night-crawlers are repelled by salt. Farewell to you, then.' He strolls off towards his house and you are left to mull over his advice as you continue your journey on foot.

Worth a thousand words

I was totting up the number of sections in the FL books the other day. It comes to 4369 "paras", as Jamie and I refer to them - almost the equivalent of eleven Fighting Fantasy books. It's a wonder we didn't get brain hernias. (Really, 'cause that's a thing.)

Anyway, it set me to thinking... How many major quests are there in the first six books? How many recurring non-player characters? How many different locations? If it was a CRPG, how long would it take to play through?

And doesn't it make you wish there were another six covers on that infographic..?