Spooky Review: True Singapore Ghost Stories Vol.7 & Vol 8 by Russell Lee

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The Almost Complete Collection of True Singapore Ghost Stories (also True Singapore Ghost Stories or TSGS) is one of the bestselling book series in Singapore. With over 1.5 million copies sold,[citation needed] the series has become a household name since its inception in 1989. Russell Lee, a Singaporean author, compiles reports, stories and interviews about the supernatural. Light and entertaining, each book, which comprises about 30 stories, appeals to both children and mature readers.

Most of the stories take place in Asia but some take place in other parts of the world. Lee also includes articles about the paranormal, featuring detailed investigations into the occult, witchcraft, vampires and other similar topics. Lee stresses[citation needed] that the articles are for reading pleasure, not research. WIKI

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October was really busy and I was planning to post my reviews for TSGS especially also because it was the spooky month. 

I also thought I had written a review already but apparently, I did not. I found these books by accident. I found volumes 7 and 8 at a local library and it sucked me in with all the creepy stories and also because their Asian stories, it made it even scarier. 

Here's a complete summary of my reading adventures with TSGS (from my IG)

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True Singaporean Ghost Stories by Russell Lee vol.7

I bookmarked this with a flyer and it was still on the shelf at the library, where I left it last. It's not very scary. So far "Thriller part two" seemed a bit on the supernatural side everything else is just spooky ghost hauntings. It's definitely a fun book to read ......during the day.





Fun fact the author Russell Lee wears a mask to signing events and nobody knows what he looks like.

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Finally finished True Singapore Ghost Stories Vol 7! I hope I don't get nightmares lah😅

Excerpt from one of the last stories: 

"It all happened last year when my cousin and I tried to unravel the secrets of the supernatural. We thought we could get the dead to help us in our studies as we were doing really badly in our exams" - Dim-witted Deal pg. 139.

The Author Russell Lee likes to comment on every story. This story was definitely a bit scary: maybe exam pressures are way higher in Singapore than in Su: alamak, I would never go to supernatural lengths, man.

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True Singapore Ghost Stories vol 8 by Russel Lee! 

I love these books and very sad that the library does not have the other volumes. I would definitely recommend picking this up for a read or if you want to question every sound and bump in the night and just increase your anxiety just a bit.



The cover design actually has a skull imprint on it that I didn't even notice.




_9/10

It by Stephen King

The story follows the exploits of seven children as they are terrorized by an eponymous being, which exploits the fears and phobias of its victims in order to disguise itself while hunting its prey. "It" primarily appears in the form of a clown in order to attract its preferred prey of young children. The novel is told through narratives alternating between two time periods and is largely told in the third-person omniscient mode. It deals with themes which would eventually become King staples: the power of memory, childhood trauma, and the ugliness lurking behind a façade of traditional small-town values.GOODREADS

"The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years-if it ever did-began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain" ch.1pg.3

I started reading It in 2011 and then abruptly put it aside for a while....alright for two years. Not that I was scared or anything.......

Although I stopped reading in 2011 the first chapter has always lingered in my mind. It's to be a very well described and memorable start. On a rainy day a paper boat sailing down the gutters. A boy in yellow slickers and red goloshes in its wake. I can see it! Other memorable scenes that have stayed with me since I started in 2011, is when somebody talks through the sink addressing a strange voice that says "it's legion". This is also when I stopped reading because if there are voices coming from your sink you run...you run like hell!

It's a lengthy book of 1090 pages that spans over 28 years. From the beginning to the end you'll feel like you're friends with the characters  (the Losers) and the ending will be bittersweet. 

The seven children are the main characters and they refer to themselves as The Losers. Yes, it's sad. Each of them has their own distinguishing characteristic. Bill's the leader who grows up to be a writer and Ben an architect.  They all have some talents and some weaknesses which when confronted by the evil "It" they overcome together. Friendship is a theme here and something that's lost in the end. That's what makes the ending bittersweet. 

While reading "It" something interesting to ponder is, what It actually IS. At some point in the middle, It's something that takes the form of the thing you fear the most. Conclusion It's a.......BOGGART! Ha! And being a Ravenclaw myself with some Defense Against the Dark Arts Training this monster is just riddikulus. Well, it was, up till the story changed and more was known about where It came from ...from out there. So It's an alien?

However, at the final showdown, we learn that It's something that existed before the universe. I was reading the book together with a friend of mine and after seriously discussing what to call it we've decided on classifying It as a Primordial being. Although calling It an alien works for me too.

The characterization is really well done and I love it. Even some of the villain like characters have some intriguing backstories. Like Patrick Hockstetter one of the bullies. A boy who kills things and puts them in a fridge and believes he alone, exists. Patrick is a monster but then what is It? Or Eddy's mother or Henry Bowers background?

Something surprising was the addition of It's POV at the last showdown. I'd definitely recommend this although I'd advise not to read it at night. It's not as scary (bad) as Pet Sematary. On a side note, I'd also suggest Danse Macabre (by Stephen King) as a companion to any Stephen King books you're planning on reading. In this case for this book. I haven't finished Danse Macabre, but chapter two was very insightful and useful when reading It. 

Happy reading!

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The Sandman , Vol.1: Preludes and Nocturnes by Neil Gaiman

A wizard attempting to capture Death to bargain for eternal life traps her younger brother Dream instead. Fearful for his safety, the wizard kept him imprisoned in a glass bottle for decades. After his escape, Dream, also known as Morpheus, goes on a quest for his lost objects of power. On the way, Morpheus encounters Lucifer and demons from Hell, the Justice League, and John Constantine, the Hellblazer. This book also includes the story "The Sound of Her Wings" which introduces us to the pragmatic and perky goth girl, Death.GOODREADS

Author: Neil Gaiman
Illustrator(s): Sam Kieth and Mike Dringenberg
Letterer: Todd Klein
Series: The Sandman  

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How would you feel about life if Death was your older sister?

As a whole this makes a fantastic collection of the Sandman comics. Rich with several  mythological characters and famous figures from the comic world.

 Volume 1 consists of issues 1-8. It follows Dream as he's accidentally kidnapped by a wizard ,who then out of fear imprisons Dream in a glass bottle. When the wizard had summoned Dream I was disappointed because the thing that had appeared was not what I expected Dream to look like. He looks like an alien with a flies head. Only later do we see that it was Dreams mask (one of his objects of power) which is taken from him later. I was thrilled and surprised because The Sandman looks a lot like Neil Gaiman or maybe Mr Gaiman goes around dressed as The Sandman. Unruly hair ,long dark raincoat. Or maybe he is The Sandman.

#1 and #2 follows the Sandman as he is captured and imprisoned in the bottle . While he waits to exact revenge he sits silently watching his captives while the world sleeps restlessly. Years pass and the Sandman finally escapes and then takes his revenge but must still find his lost objects (the ruby, helmet and pouch) #2 Imperfect Hosts, is where the sandman goes back to his world to find it in ruin. He then summons the Fates to inquire about the whereabouts of his lost objects:
The pouch is with one of my  favorite Englishman, John Constantine . The helmet with a demon in hell and the ruby with a member of the Justice League . This issue also sports a cameo of Batman and Robin. Notable figures are the Fates and Cain and Abel.

#3 Dream a Little Dream of Me, Constantine's appearance was something I was looking forward to but it was a bit disappointing. Then again that might not be saying much because I liked Keanu Reeves as Constantine. I have read one of the Hellblazer issues: in comparison, it's the same Constantine . The same level of cynical and depressing atmosphere. Dream finds Constantine and they go look for the pouch , which Constantine's ex-girlfriend stole. Although it wasn't what I expected it's one of my favorite issues (in this volume).

#4 A Hope in Hell, This is another of my favorites from this volume. Dream goes to hell to retrieve his helmet. He encounters Etrigan (a demon and half brother of Merlin), dream also finds hell in a different state. Lucifer is no longer sole ruler. He shares his rule with Beelzebub and Azazel. When Lucifer is introduced I was shocked because he looked like one of the damn  Bee Gees! That's not what a person expects, you know? . The demon who has Dream's helmet challenges him to a duel for the helmet. Dream wins , but Lucifer questions him "why should he let him leave  unscratched or leave at all". Dream blows me away with the  manner he escapes , he is a hope in hell and that's the reason they should let him leave.

#5 -#7, Passengers, follows the search for the Ruby. Doctor Destiny escapes Arkham asylum and hijacks a car with a woman in it. Doctor Destiny is going to get the ruby which he's altered to only work for him. Dream finds it first but the ruby resists him and takes some of his energy . Doctor Destiny shows up and takes the ruby. He plans to make the world go mad and be the king . #6 24 hours, Doctor Destiny's killing time in a diner while the world goes mad. He keeps the people in the diner there for 24 hours driving them mad and making them kill each other. Doctor destiny is twisted and really insane. Only after all the crazy has happend does Dream show up.  #7 Sound and Fury, dream challenges Doctor Destiny to a fight in his world. Dream tricks him into destroying the ruby, which gives Dream his powers back. Dream restores the world and returns Doctor Destiny to the asylum. and the world sleeps soundly.

#8 The Sound of Her Wings, This is my number one favorite. We get to meet Death, Dreams sister. She dresses in all black and has the same black unruly hair as her younger brother. She's death but she's full of life.    This issue follows dream and his sister while she reaps the living.







This comic is rated 18+. It does have some nudity and graphic scenes where people kill each other and are murdered .  There's a lot of death. The sandman has a lot of names. Morpheus, King of dreams, Dream and others I suppose. There's even a martian from the Justice League who knows him (which says something about his age). This comic has a lot going for it, good writing, good characterization and the art is pretty good if not creepy at times. It's also fun to read and meet characters you've know from other stories.So why wouldn't you read it?

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Vampire Hunter D volume 3 by Hideyuki Kikuchi , adapted and illustrated by Saiko Takaki

The third volume of the popular Japanese series comes to America in Vampire Hunter D: Demon Deathchase. The vampire hunter known only as D has been hired by a wealthy, dying man to find his daughter, who was kidnapped by the powerful vampire Lord Meierlink. Though humans speak well of Meierlink, the price on his head is too high for D to ignore and he sets out to save her before she can be turned into an undead creature of the night. In the nightmare world of 12090 A.D., finding Meierlink before he reaches the spaceport in the Clayborn States and gets off the planet will be hard enough, but D has more than just Meierlink to worry about. The dying man is taking no chances, and has also enlisted the Marcus family, a renegade clan of four brothers and a sister who don't care who they kill as long as they get paid. Beautiful illustrations by Yoshitaka Amano complement the post-apocalyptic plot, filled with chilling twists. Co-Published with Digital Manga Publishing.GOODREADS

* the description of the manga belongs to another edition. The edition being reviewed is adapted and illustrated by Saiko Takaki.

First off, I'm not familiar with the other two volumes or the story arc. This is my introduction to this manga. Not knowing certain things did bother me: like why the hell does D have a face or an ugly speaking face on his hand or why he's so mysterious and why the old guy seemed to know him. I guess being ignorant of D's background made this less impressive but it doesn't really ruin the plot,  it just makes a person curious so it's safe to read this as a stand alone. Then again I don't know why you would start at 3 when you should start with one.

The plot is predictable , I mean vampire falls in love with human, they run away, dad is disgusted, hires hunters,  girl hunter sympathizes because she likes D, a dramatic scene where the Meierlink gets killed and then human girl impales herself because she can't live without him. Predictable. 

What made it interesting was the characters and the illustrations. D's mysterious and I don't get him. Then there's the Marcus clan ( a bunch of morons, moron clan) and the Noble vampire who kidnaps the damsel. Then there's the 3 assassins from some village. They all die and the way they kept coming back was surprising and frustrating. I mean die already!

As for the illustrations. Lets see: the body of the characters ,their cloths (in this case I mean the men's cloths) are done really well and are amazing. But the faces aren't as attractive as the clothes . The faces are weird looking in my opinion but the expressions are unique and eye-catching. 

There are three female characters in this manga. I hated them all.  There's the damsel; who almost gets raped then saved by this guy who then tries to rape her and again gets rescued by a Marcus brother . Then there's the female Marcus member: she's suppose to be bad ass but is being sexually abused by her "brothers" and one of the assassins who's in this really skimpy outfit (how do you fight in that?!). The word "sexist' is swimming around in my head, but I'm not sure if I should use it. It is what it is. The assassin used her body as a weapon, the Marcus girl's a reasonable fighter but kind of weak and the damsel's too kind and naive. plus the other two aforementioned ones have these huge boobs. Maybe not extremely huge ones, but they're very apparent, noticeable. like they'd poke you in the eye or something. how do you fight with those?!

Predictable plot and crappy female characters aside, it's still a fun manga to read . I didn't know it was set in the year 12090 A.D and that this was also a science fiction manga, that wasn't as apparent in this volume as the boobs ,but one of the reasons I'd give it a try if ever I come across another volume.

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Red Dragon (Hannibal lecter #1) by Thomas Harris

Lying on a cot in his cell with Alexandre Dumas's Le Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine open on his chest, Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter makes his debut in this legendary horror novel, which is even better than its sequel,The Silence of the Lambs. As in Silence, the pulse-pounding suspense plot involves a hypersensitive FBI sleuth who consults psycho psychiatrist Lecter for clues to catching a killer on the loose.The sleuth, Will Graham, actually quit the FBI after nearly getting killed by Lecter while nabbing him, but fear isn't what bugs him about crime busting. It's just too creepy to get inside a killer's twisted mind. But he comes back to stop a madman who's been butchering entire families. The FBI needs Graham's insight, and Graham needs Lecter's genius. But Lecter is a clever fiend, and he manipulates both Graham and the killer at large from his cell.
That killer, Francis Dolarhyde, works in a film lab, where he picks his victims by studying their home movies. He's obsessed with William Blake's bizarre painting The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun, believing there's a red dragon within him, the personification of his demonic drives. Flashbacks to Dolarhyde's terrifying childhood and superb stream-of-consciousness prose get us right there inside his head. When Dolarhyde does weird things, we understand why. We sympathize when the voice of the cruel dead grandma who raised and crazed him urges him to mayhem--she's way scarier than that old bat in Psycho. When he falls in love with a blind girl at the lab, we hope he doesn't give in to Grandma's violent advice.
This book is awesomely detailed, ingeniously plotted, judiciously gory, and fantastically imagined. If you haven't read it, you've never had the creeps. --Tim Appelo GOODREADS

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This is a book I bought on sale at my local bookstore and it was worth it. It's a classic but disturbing psychological thriller. One of the motivations for buying this book is the movie and also because I wanted to know more about Hannibal Lecter.

There's a forword by Thomas Harris before the first chapter, in which he explains his first encounter with Hannibal and how he became a recurring character in these books.  For some reason this gave me a foreboding feeling about  reading the book. A few chapters into the book was disturbing because Will goes to the house of one of the families that was murdered and walks through the scene. It's so well written that the gruesomeness of the scene scares and disturbs you.

Will's character is a well fleshed out one and so are some of the other  characters. He's suffering some trauma from the last case he worked on in which he had caught Hannibal. Crawford, an FBI agent working on the "Red Dragon " case asks Will to help him because it's similar to the Hannibal one and Will has a mind for these cases. Will can project  other peoples points of view and he can feel what their feeling. This is what makes him good at his job even tho he hates it.

Eventually Will decides to consult Hannibal on this case. If you pick  this book only for Hannibal then you should know he only has few scenes but significant ones. When Will first visits him in the mental institution (pg75), this scene has a kind of sinister and foreboding atmosphere to it. Hannibal is a sociopath and a trained psychologist. He feels no guilt about the people he's killed  and no shame about it. What makes him even more scary but also intriguing is the way he can read people and manipulate them. If you'd met this guy on the street you'd be charmed, you wouldn't suspect he was a sociopathic murderer!

The book picks up the pace when the murderer ,called from the start of the book the Tooth fairy, sends Hannibal a letter. The FBI intercepts this letter and try to communicate with the tooth fairy. This doesn't work out so well in the end.

Further into the book we start reading chapters and passages about the Tooth Fairy, Francis Dolarhyde.Who thinks there's a Red Dragon living inside him. To him murdering people is a process that will change him into the Dragon. Francis is obsessed with William Blake's painting of The Great Red Dragon and The Woman Clothed in the Sun. *behold on the right ->
I'm even creeped out by this painting ,so I don' get his obsession with it.

This painting is the explanation to the title. It's called the Red Dragon because of Francis obsession with the painting, but there are several other references about dragons throughout the book: When Will finds a Chinese character carved into a tree near one of the victims houses, which appears on Chinese mahjong pieces and marks the red dragon or the red finger print powder called dragons blood.

He has it tattooed on his back , he has printouts in his house.  Francis chapters are fascinating to read because there are flashbacks to his past : when he was born with a facial disfigurement (hare lip) , living with his grandmother and how he was treated by them and his mother an step siblings. Seeing how he was and how he is: leaves me with the question that if he was in a healthier environment , would he have become a murderer?

Francis changes when he meets Reba McClane. This is my favorite part. Francis and the Dragon separate. The dragon now has an individual voice that sounds similar to his grandmother, telling him he doesn't need Reba and he should kill her. Francis attempts to become one again with the Dragon by breaking into a museum and consuming the actual painting of the Great Red Dragon.

Things don't work out in the end. Francis fakes his death and then tries to kill Will. The killers dead but the book doesn't really have a happy ending more like a depressing one. Everything's explained in the last chapter and on the last page Will goes on about somebody named "Shiloh" which is confusing.

I'd definitely recommend this to anybody who enjoyed the movie or is just interested in a good book about the criminal Psyche. The characters are well developed and the writing is amazing and easy to follow.

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