The following twelve stories, though likewise imbued with recognisable tropes drawn from folktale, myth, gothic, and horror fiction, are far less safe in approach or content, but equally concerned with how perpetually unjust the world can be, how ghosts will insist on haunting us, and how powerful the desire is to circumvent the roles that society has enforced upon women in particular. Set in the Indonesian everyday, these stories twist the familiar until it is uncanny, unsettling, even startling. Standouts in this respect are ‘Scream in a Bottle’ in which an old woman in the cliff-side town of Cadas Pangeran fills a cupboard with mothers’ screams; ‘Blood’, a mix of the mundane and the horrific in which a copywriter recalls a blood-eating hag while working on a new maxi pad campaign; and ‘The Well’, which reads like a surreal dream as a favourite daughter, desperate to escape nursing her elderly father, discovers a labyrinthine forest inside a room in their Dutch-era house.

Epstein’s fine translation of Paramaditha’s stories is also worth noting. The prose is sharp, the rhythm lively, and words have clearly been chosen carefully so as not to obscure the original work’s strong narrative voice.