Contemporary Authors

CASSANDRA KHAW writes horror, press releases, video games, articles about video games, and tabletop RPGs. These are not necessarily unrelated items. Her work can be found in professional short story magazines such as Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Fireside Fiction, Uncanny, and the scientific journal Nature. Cassandra’s first original novella Hammers on Bone came out in October 2016. To her mild surprise, people seem to enjoy it.

AUTHOR CASSANDRA KHAW AND THE COMPASSION OF HORROR
A.J. O'CONNELL
03-28-17
Many speculative fiction readers love science fiction and fantasy, but flinch from horror. If you love speculative fiction, however, author Cassandra Khaw makes a compelling argument for why you should also be reading horror: it could make you a better human.

“If fantasy and science fiction can open our eyes to different ideals and worldviews, different interpretations of our present and our future, then horror is almost mandatory,” she said. “Horror opens us up as humans and demands that we investigate the impulses that we all have, but most of us suppress.”

I read Khaw’s 2016 novella, Hammers on Bone, last year while I was on a Lovecraft retelling kick. But Hammers on Bone was something else entirely — it veered into noir and horror. Not the arms-length, emotionally-distant sort of horror Lovecraft used, but full-on, squishy, visceral terror.

John Persons, Khaw’s protagonist, is a modern P.I.. He is hired by a little boy to kill an abusive stepfather. Why Persons? Because neither he nor the stepdad are human. They’re Elder Things. Persons (who I should point out, is a likable, sympathetic character) is wearing someone else’s body like a suit.

It’s gruesome, it’s compelling, and it is also strangely compassionate.

Gore and compassion

Khaw doesn’t shy away from gore, and it’s something she does purposefully, and with a lot of respect for the human body — using scent and taste — senses the horror film industry doesn’t have access to.

Strangely enough, it’s a bid for creating a little kindness in the world. If readers see how difficult it is to kill and to die, Khaw hopes they might respect suffering more.

“I think Hollywood and mass media doesn’t really respect the idea of death. It’s always buckets of blood and almost glamorous,” she said. “In reality, when someone dies, it’s this slow, stuttering, painful thing.”

It’s the smell and taste of bodily fluids. It’s suffocating slowly in your own lungs. It’s an organ giving out. And it’s something we will all experience.

“I kind of want to remind people of that, and in some weird way, warn people away from the idea that death is easy. And I’m hoping it sticks, so the next time they hear that someone got hurt on the news, they’re not just going to brush it off,” said Khaw.

Khaw based the book on a different kind of horror; two children she heard of who’d been abused for years, while no one around them said anything.

“It just kind of hit me how horrifying that is, that if we see it happening on a daily basis, slowly and surely, we just normalize it and expect it to be ok,” said Khaw. “Because the alternative thought — the idea that it might not be okay — frightens people in general.”

Games and novels

Khaw lives in Malaysia, and has traveled the world in her career as a tech and games journalist. She’s a huge reader — one of her favorite authors is Frances Hardinge. (I refer you to this Twitter thread.) She writes a lot; one of her most recent projects is a video game, the award-winning She Remembered Caterpillars, a “color matching, fungi-punk, puzzle game that is about injecting cute into invasive brain surgery.”

The process of writing the game was much more collaborative than writing fiction.

“If novel writing is this solo project where you just kind of hide in the woods and bang on a keyboard for six weeks, writing for games is stirring around trying to wedge words into more complicated pieces and hoping it looks great instead of causing the whole machine to fall down,” she said.

It also involved fewer words; Khaw’s first script for the game was 40 pages long, and had to be cut down to about five. Much of the story ended up being told through the art.

“Video game writing reminded me that very word, every pixel, is completely open to interpretation. This applies to anything you touch. So video writing has made me at least marginally more self-aware in terms of my writing elsewhere.”

Making monsters

Right now, Khaw is working on a piece about mermaids, a follow-up to a recent short story, And In Our Daughters, We Find a Voice, published in The Dark Magazine. It’s a retelling of The Little Mermaid, in its own way.

“The story basically started with me seeing an image, this comic that said, why does anyone expect Ariel to give birth to babies, wouldn’t she spawn eggs,” said Khaw. “And that kind of went into a horrible place after that.”

Khaw’s creatures, like Lovecraft’s, and HR Giger’s, are utterly inhuman. She spends a great deal of time creating them; understanding their bodies, their civilizations, and their needs. It’s another step toward compassion.

“Human beings, when we see something that looks like us, our first thought is to impose our own views and values and ethics on it,” she said, “whereas when confronted with something that is genuinely alien, all of our preconceptions just stop because we have no idea how to function anymore.”

Working in Lovecraft’s world

A Song For Quiet, Khaw’s follow-up to Hammers on Bone, will be released later this year by Tor.com, bringing back John Persons and all the eldritch horror that comes with him. This book will also introduce one of H.P. Lovecraft’s favorite settings: Arkham.

Many authors have played in the sandbox of Lovecraft’s world, making it their own. Many have also embraced his creatures but rejected the man himself — Lovecraft was notoriously racist, sexist, and xenophobic.

When I asked Khaw how she navigates his world as an author of color, she replied that working in that world felt natural.

“It feels a lot like writing as a queer woman of color from a third world nation that half of the people I meet still don’t actually know exists,” she said. “In a way, writing Lovecraft’s world kind of feels like just being myself and marching into the West and just seeing the — not necessarily bigotry — but just the culture that’s stacked up against you.”

Hungry for more of Khaw’s work? You can find her other books and stories here.

CASSANDRA KHAW writes a lot. Sometimes, she writes press releases and excited emails for Singaporean micropublisher Ysbryd Games. Sometimes, she writes for technology and video games outlets like Eurogamer, Ars Technica, The Verge, and Engadget. Her short fiction can be found in publications such as Uncanny, Clarkesworld, and Fireside Fiction. She occasionally spends time in a Muay Thai gym punching people and pads.

Rupert Wong is an investigator by day and cannibal chef by night. A whipping boy for the gods, he will tantalize your tastebuds and set your mouth watering … as long as there’s human meat around. Things go sideways when Ao Qin, Dragon of the South, god of the seas, bursts into Rupert’s apartment and ropes him into investigating a grisly murder. Success means Rupert gets to live another day; failure means nothing more or less than a one-way ticket to Diyu, the Chinese hell. Grab your jockstrap, and strap on your kevlar, because Food of the Gods doesn’t fight fair.

Cassandra Khaw burst onto the scene last year with her gut-punching debut novella, Hammer of Bones—a modern Lovecraftian noir that’s not for the squeamish, but hits all the right notes. To say I was excited for her full length debut is an easy understatement. It’s not often that an emerging writer so effortlessly combines classic inspirations with such modern style and panache. Food of the Gods plays with a lot of familiar archetypes—Rupert is a down-on-your-luck investigator solving a murder. What’s so special about Khaw’s writing, though, is that even when she’s working with these tried-and-true archetypes, her prose is so delicious and her voice so hip that everything old feels new again. Khaw’s writing and world-building oozes style. It’s modern and approachable, inspired but not dogged down by its obvious forbears like Chandler and Lovecraft.

Every page is quotable. Her settings are full of life, characters unto themselves:

The Chinese Hell isn’t such a bad place if you’re just visiting.

Unpleasantly warm, sure. Cacophonous, definitely. But the denizens are cultured, fastidious about personal hygiene, and too practical for blanket judgements. If you can get over the idea that the entire dimension pivots on an industry of deserved torture, Diyu, while hardly a top vacation spot, is rather like a more sanitary Kuala Lumpur.” (Ch. 16)

She uses humour like a scalpel to dissect some of the more sensitive social issues that plague the work of her inspirations:

“Nyarlathotep.”

“Who?”

“Me.” He passes me the joint. “That’s who I am. I am the Crawling Chaos, the God of a Thousand Forms, the Stalker among the Stars, the Faceless God. I am the son of Azathoth, the Blind Idiot God. I am the voice of the Outer Gods, the destruction of humanity, and a happy fabrication of H.P. Lovecraft.”

“You’re a figment of someone else’s imagination?”

“More like an analogy for an irrational fear of the foreign.” (Ch. 29)

And, well, sometimes Khaw just likes to get down and dirty:

I’ve regretted many things over the last thirty-seven years. Flirtations with recreational chemicals, second-degree murder, an ex-girlfriend with an alarming propensity for strap-ons. But I don’t think I’ve quite regretted anything as much as trusting Bob to whisk us away to safety. (Ch. 6)

Khaw is always tip-toeing the line between “Oh, god, this is too much,” and “My stomach’s churning, but in sort of a good way.” The underworld that Rupert travels through is degenerate and horrifying, but it’s also creative and endlessly diverse. Despite the subject matter that pervades most of the book (which, if I’m being frank, is not to my personal taste, making its success all the more satisfying), it’s fun to spend time with Rupert as he crashes through Diyu, gets caught in the crossfire at a soup kitchen, or catches his guts as they spill out of his belly. It’s not going to be for everyone, but even if it sounds revolting (and sometimes it is; Rupert is a cannibal chef, after all), you might be surprised to find you enjoy it anyway.

Food of the Gods moves at a torrential pace, and Khaw let up in hopes of you catching your breath. It’s exhilarating, but once in a while things become a little difficult to keep track of, especially as Rupert jumps ship from one pantheon to another to another (we’ve got Chinese gods, Malaysian gods, Greek gods, social media gods, and even a few of Lovecraftian gods, to name a few). While billed as a novel, Food of the Gods is actually two related novellas smooshed together—this works well enough, but the transition between the first and second novella is abrupt and skips over some complicated advancements in Rupert’s relationship with his undead girlfriend, Minah. This could have been improved by adding some interstitial content to tie everything together. It feels like a four-chapter chunk of the novel is missing. But, by the time you notice, you’ll be so far gone down the rabbit hole that you probably won’t care.

In fact, the first novella, “Rupert Wong, Cannibal Chef,” is itself a terrific stand alone experience that offers a messy but complex and unexpected conclusion. One of Khaw’s strengths is the way she keeps the reader on their toes—not unfairly playing with their expectations, but filling her stories with genuine surprises and twists.

Rupert Wong, who Khaw has described as “Rincewind smooshed together with Constantine,” is the star of the show, and he really shines in Food of the Gods. He’s complex without being obtuse, frenetic and proactive, but only because he really just wants to slow down and take a breath, driven, but also malleable. He’s a right asshole, but he’s also got a good heart buried in there somewhere, and truly does believe he’s the hero in his own story. But, what really makes the novel work is the interactions between Rupert and the many characters he crosses paths with. Whether they’re gods or more simple underworld denizens, like the ghost child Jian Wang, they are all interesting and feel like they have a place in the greater world.

With Starz’ television adaptation of American Gods earning rave reviews, there’s no better time for Food of the Gods, which reads like a modernized sequel to Gaiman’s 2001 novel. The gods are at war—with themselves, and the inexorable wave of modern pop culture.

“I’m more of a short film than a YouTube video. A man named Robert Morgan spun me out of his sister’s nightmare and then the Internet gave me some meat to my bones. And ever since then, I’ve been a real boy, sustained by page views and retweets, gorged on every ten-minute twitch of human horror.”

His grin is ghastly. “Don’t look so surprised, now. I’m just like yer gods. Only hipper.”

The thought of Yan Luo of Guan Yun participating in modern trends, trading phrases from MTV videos or donning hipster-glasses, elicits a strangled laugh. The Cat grins wider. “You heard it here first: churches are dead; YouTube and Snapchat and Facebook are the new houses of worship.” (Ch. 23)

Food of the Gods opens in Kuala Lumpur, which Khaw describes as “a conundrum of skyscrapers, post-colonial architecture, and verdant green jungle.” It’s rich and vibrant, stuffed to the brim with interesting characters and places, overflowing with history and magic. Around every corner there’s something new or interesting to see. It’s refreshing to read an urban fantasy that isn’t written in a same ol’, same ol’ setting.

“Coming from Malaysia, people of color are the status quo,” Khaw wrote on Terrible Minds. “We’re Indian, Chinese, Malay, Kadazan, Dusun, Iban—the list goes on. White people, on the other hand, different. And that kind of bled through. I wrote what I knew: a metropolis where ghosts were almost real, a place where cultures intermingled, where pirated DVDs still abound. I borrowed from our myths and our urban legends. I borrowed from my ethnic culture. (I’m ethnically Chinese, but am a Malaysian citizen.) I borrowed from our ideas of the Western World, who they represented, and what they were.”

The way that Khaw blends so many various cultures, from Malaysian to Chinese, Western to, umm… divine is impressive and creates a sense of place that feels alive. Midway through the book, however, there’s a disappointing shift from Kuala Lumpur to London, the setting of choice for so many urban fantasy writers. It’s not that Khaw’s take on London is less rich or evocative than Kuala Lumpur, but it’s as same ol’, same ol’ as you can get, and the book loses a bit of what made it special after Rupert leaves his home country.

With Food of the Gods, Cassandra Khaw has served up a delectable dish. It overcomes its structural flaws by leaning heavily on its style, gorgeous prose, and wildly charismatic characters. It’s not often you see such a convincing blend of culture, style, and sheer readability (even in the face of unending violence and a stomach-churning season of Top Chef: Underworld), but Khaw does it all. Food of the Gods is so decadent and flavourful that you’ll want a second helping and dessert. (Just make sure Rupert Wong’s not working in the kitchen.)

Khaw’s first full-length novel (a fix-up of two previously published novellas) is a gut-punch of a reading experience that swings the reader disturbingly between laughing out loud and beginning to retch. In a dense setting of degenerate old gods in the modern age, Rupert Wong—bureaucrat in the Chinese Hell, high-end chef to ghouls who dine on human flesh, and home to a large collection of ghosts who live in his tattoos—is drawn unwillingly into investigating a dispute provoked by the death of the daughter of the Dragon King. His search for a solution sends him from Kuala Lumpur to London, where the Greek gods desire both his culinary skills and his supernatural connections. Descriptive imagery dances viscerally on the edge between the delicious and the disgusting; clever wordplay twines with heavy profanity; the mood flips rapidly among comedy, horror, and tenderness. This amazing book is perfect for foodies, readers of modernized mythology and light supernaturals, and fans of the smart, underpowered survivor who wins in the face of cosmic might and mundane brawn.

Food of the Gods is a mosaic novel, of sorts. It collects three linked novellas by Cassandra Khaw that, together, form a whole arc. At least two of these novellas have already been published as standalone e-books. The first of these is called ‘‘Rupert Wong, Cannibal Chef’’, and if I tell you it really does live up to the title, you’ve got some idea of the flavour of the novel as a whole.

Only some idea, though, because Food of the Gods is more energetic, more vibrant, more appealing, and more downright weird that even ‘‘cannibal chef’’ might imply.

Some of that weirdness, I’ll admit, is purely due to my unfamiliarity with the myths and folklore that Khaw is using. ‘‘Rupert Wong, Cannibal Chef’’ is set in Malaysia – in Kuala Lumpur, to be precise – and the second novella, ‘‘Rupert Wong and the Ends of the Earth’’ opens there as well. With pantheons and supernatural beings I’d never really encountered before, Food of the Gods demanded that I pay attention just to keep up, but it rewarded that attention: while Food of the Gods might hold the appeal, in part, of novelty, its individual parts are tight, tense, well-constructed examples of urban fantasy.

Rupert Wong works for ghouls in Kuala Lumpur, thanks to some deals he made to lower the amount of time he’ll spend in Hell. He’s a chef. The food he prepares is, naturally, made from humans: if you have a dodgy stomach, this is not the book for you, because Khaw delights in the gruesome throughout. The entertainingly gruesome… but still, preparing human meat for consumption is a taboo that Khaw doesn’t just play with: she cuts it open, pulls out its entrails, and rolls around in them.

In the course of ‘‘Rupert Wong, Cannibal Chef’’, Rupert gets involved in the affairs of dragons – a family affair, involving a murder, and also involving the Furies, visitors to Malaysia from abroad. This complicated political landscape enmeshes Rupert in intrigues, and in consequences: flippant, irreverent Rupert is no one’s idea of a canny diplomat. His attempts, in the course of these supernatural politics, to protect (and bargain for the salvation of) the nolonger- exactly-a-woman he loves earn him enmity from several interested parties.

In ‘‘Rupert Wong and the Ends of the Earth,’’ the consequences of Rupert’s earlier actions catch up with him. He has to go to London – to Croyden, to be exact – where his ghoulish bosses have loaned him out to the Greek gods who’ve made London their new home. There, Rupert finds more supernatural politics. And gruesome shit. And in the third part of this linked narrative, ‘‘Meat, Bone, Tea’’, the new gods of chaos offer Rupert – still stuck in London, far from home – a deal.

Khaw writes with vivid energy. Rupert’s cynical and irreverent voice as a narrator is immensely appealing, and Rupert himself is a fairly compelling character: aware that his residual morals sometimes make him a hypocrite, and more wearily resigned than shocked at every new horror that intrudes into his life. He is perpetually on the lookout for his own advantage and survival – which is compelling and amusing once you realise that Rupert is just a bit cleverer than he lets on.

How does Food of the Gods work as a whole? It’s episodic, since the first two parts – the independently- published novellas – can stand alone, but thematically and in mood, it stands very well as a unity.

Its major unifying theme is that gods and demons, regardless of pantheon, are assholes. (No, really, they’re assholes.) And across its parts, Food of the Gods has a deep concern with domestic violence, especially violence against women, and how many obstacles stand between women and any escape from the violence they are subjected to – much less justice. Food of the Gods is also concerned with the lengths women will go to in order to achieve an end to the violence to which they are subject – or justice, or revenge.

This is also an urban fantasy with very modern concerns. Food of the Gods is intensely interested not in colonialism alone, but in the realities of a post-colonial world, both in supernatural and in human terms. Seen through Rupert’s eyes, London and Croyden become strange: a familiar setting become exotic (I hate that word, but it works), seen through unfamiliar eyes. It reverses the exoticisation of non-European (and non-North-American) places and peoples that’s very nearly standard in fantasy, and does it with an offhandedly challenging grin.

Food of the Gods is well-paced, with at times stomach-curdling tension. Its energetic prose leaps off the page. I enjoyed Khaw’s novella Hammers on Bone – but Food of the Gods demonstrates that she has range. I look forward to seeing what she does next.

Abaddon Books has a number of shared universes with multiple writers dabbling in their continuities, much like the Marvel and DC stables; one of their more recent worlds is Gods and Monsters, pioneered by horror writer Chuck Wendig. It’s therefore appropriate that Cassandra Khaw has also joined this universe, with Food of the Gods. Food of the Gods was originally e-published as two novellas, one the sequel of the other; this collected edition brings the two together.

Each follows the adventures of Rupert Wong, Cannibal Chef; although Khaw may be misusing this moniker, since while Rupert butchers, prepares, and cooks human flesh for various entities, he himself does not seem to partake, with possible exceptions of tasting what he is himself cooking. Food of the Gods has a broad palate, taking in Malaysian cuisine, British staples, Western failures to cook South-East Asian food, Greek delicacies and more; one of Khaw’s great strengths is in her ability to write these foods with a deft touch that really makes the mouth water and nostrils twitch, even when the chief ingredient is homo sapiens. That’s of a piece with Khaw’s generally sense-centred writing; things have scents, sounds, feels, even tastes, as much as they’re seen, really invoking a kind of vividness through the writing that wholly engages the reader.

The voice of the book is also engaging; we’re told the story by Rupert Wong himself in the first person, and Food of the Gods does not stint on asides to the reader, on Malay and slang (the reader is addressed as ang moh throughout – or “white person”), and on the humour; Khaw often undercuts the most tense moments with Rupert’s ill-timed jokes. This combination can take a little while to get into, but rapidly it becomes a very individual narrative voice that demands the reader’s sympathy for Rupert and one’s concern for his future. Khaw also manages to make each of her secondary characters sound individual, a risky business with such a strong narrative voice; but each is distinct and unique, and strange in their own, divine ways, without falling back into cliche or simple cultural stereotypes or expectations.

The mixture of places, pantheons and gods on display in the book makes that even more impressive; Food of the Gods utilises Malaysiana folklore and traditional religion, Greek and Slavic gods, invented beings from the fiction of the 20th century, and even gods conjured less from specific beliefs than generalised prayers. This melange of different ideas of and approaches to divinity is fascinating and reminiscent of Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods and Hogfather (the Oh God of Hangovers, for instance), but Khaw takes it in a different, stranger, and altogether darker direction than simply a discussion of faith and reality; there’s more of an interest in what faith is, and she engages with that quite fascinatingly.

The plot of Food of the Gods is, then, perhaps the weakest link. The first half of the book feels a little contrived and not sure what it wants to be; originally published as Rupert Wong: Cannibal Chef, it does an excellent job of introducing us to the character and the world he inhabits, but the combination of murder mystery and high stakes politics doesn’t really hang together, and the plot doesn’t seem quite sure of its scale. The second half, Rupert Wong and the Ends of the Earth, hangs together more by virtue of being told it does than anything else; an awful lot of it feels like filler, fleshing out the world or the pantheon but not actually advancing the plot or events. That they’re also very obviously two novellas perhaps suggests Abaddon should have published this as two slimmer volumes, rather than one seemingly-single story.

In the end, though, Food of the Gods isn’t there for its plot, it’s there for its voice, and Rupert Wong is an incredible invention with a very distinctive and fascinating voice; I want to know where Khaw plans to take him next!

Rupert Wong, “cannibal chef,” prepares food for gods and ghouls. Sometimes he is the food. He used to be a triad and has a dark past he’s not proud of. These days, he’s just trying to make enough for him and his girlfriend to get by, as well as keep the right gods and monsters happy enough to keep him out of hell. That’s hell with a capital “D” or “Diyu”, the Chinese realm of the dead.

“The holy man didn’t tell me anything I wasn’t already expecting. He said I had an express pass to all Ten Courts of Hell. I would be there for a thousand years, if I was lucky.” (Loc 198)

In an effort to work off some of his bad karma, Rupert agrees to investigate the murder of the Dragon King of the South’s daughter. The only clue is a couple of feathers rumoured to have belonged to one of the Greek Furies. Press-ganged private investigator or chef to gods and monsters, Rupert Wong could be the hero we’ve all been waiting for.

Food of the Gods (Gods and Monsters) collects Cassandra Khaw’s two Rupert Wong novellas: Rupert Wong, Cannibal Chef (2015) and Rupert Wong and the Ends of the Earth (2017). Thus, potential readers should be aware that the structure of the book is broken into two parts. It reads as two separate adventures, and so may lead to some confusion with the shift between narratives halfway through. This is only a minor criticism though, and didn’t bother me personally, especially when the writing is this entertaining.

Khaw’s prose is so much fun to read. It ranges from disgusting descriptions of body-based horror to laugh-out-loud one-liners worthy of the most sarcastic hard boiled detectives. Rupert Wong is a brilliant character who will likely become your new favourite anti-hero if he can stay alive long enough. His propensity for running off at the mouth leads him deeper and deeper into peril, as well as his genuine desire to do what’s right.

“Mr. Wong. Mr. Wong, are you alive yet?”
Yet. The first motes of consciousness string together around the word, an utterance that catalyzes curiosity. Muzzily, my brain concludes that ‘yet’ is a weird adverb to use in that sentence,” (Loc 3826)

In the first part of the book, Cassandra Khaw takes us on a blistering tour of the underbelly of Kuala Lumpur as we meet some of the supernatural denizens that lurk there. This is a city where gods and ghosts are a part of everyday life. Here’s the author on her choice of setting:

“I wrote what I knew: a metropolis where ghosts were almost real, a place where cultures intermingled, where pirated DVDs still abound. I borrowed from our myths and our urban legends. I borrowed from my ethnic culture. (I’m ethnically Chinese, but am a Malaysian citizen.)” –Cassandra Khaw

It was exciting to be immersed in such an interesting setting and I was impressed by Khaw’s world-building skills. I wanted to spend more time in this vibrant city; the short length of the first story leaving me hungry for more.

In the second story, the action moves to England’s capital. Due to events recounted in the first part of the book, Rupert Wong is advised to “get out of Kuala Lumpur.” His boss sends him to work for “the Greeks” in London.

“It’ll be fun, I’m sure. Brisk English air. Terrible people, terrible traffic. Terrible fish and chips. An entire history of Imperialist arrogance built into shit-colored walls and pretentious accents. You’ll absolutely love it.” (Loc 2374)

(Ouch! Being a British “ang moh” myself, I found that last quote painfully funny.)

Khaw’s intelligent wit is on display in the second half of the book just as much as in the first. There’s more action in the London scenes too, and just as much blood, guts and eyeballs! Parts of it reminded me a little of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, in that the Greek Pantheon are wonderfully portrayed here, warts and all. In only a few lines of prose, Khaw brings her characters to solid, vivid life, with each god or monster feeling distinct and vital.

Don’t let the gore put you off. This is impressive storytelling with a lot more going on below the surface than may initially seem apparent. When I finished Food of the Gods, I was sorry it wasn’t longer. I wanted to spend more time with Rupert Wong, as I felt like I was just starting to get to know him. And he surprised me, because I felt differently about him by the end of the story. I was emotionally invested in him. What started out as a bit of a smart-arse character with a big mouth gradually transformed into a decent man trying to do the right thing for all of us. This is all down to Cassandra Khaw’s talent. She is a writer who is now firmly on my radar. I am looking forward to what she does next.

Recommended.

I finished reading Food of the Gods shortly after seeing the season finale of American Gods, and while some of the entries in Khaw’s collection were previously published, it’s hard not to think about what’s in the air that draws genre writers to recast myth in terms of the daily grind. (And I do know this isn’t exactly a novel idea, but these are the two texts that are on my mind immediately right now, so please bear with me.) Neil Gaiman’s original novel focused on gods-as-immigrants to America, with all the challenges that entails, as well as being a paean to steadily vanishing roadside kitsch; the TV series keeps the immigration story, but adds the violent intersection of race in contemporary America to the story that is, frankly, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it element of the novel. Khaw is, like the younger Gaiman, a London-based writer, but unlike him she has her roots in Southeast Asia, and unlike American Gods, Food of the Gods goes back and forth between London and Kuala Lumpur. Her hero/not-hero (but not anti-hero) is Rupert Wong, a former gangster who has become a chef to the literal underworld to save his karma, such as it is.

The book is made up of three novellas, all of which take place in swift chronological order. ‘Rupert Wong, Cannibal Chef’ is perhaps the most straightforward story; it’s a murder mystery in which Wong is hired to investigate the death of the daughter of Ao Qin, better known as the Chinese Dragon God (who is also the patron saint of the South China Sea, a small detail of increasingly global relevance). The second story, ‘Rupert Wong and the Ends of the Earth,’ takes place shortly afterwards in the aftermath of that story, and sees Wong being hastily paid off to London to take up a new position as chef for a restaurant run by Orpheus and frequented by the Greek pantheon. This story is perhaps the weakest because it fills in the space between the previous and the final entries; there isn’t an overriding plot and the best moments are Wong’s interactions while traveling on a fourteen hour flight and his arrival at customs. The final story, ‘Meat, Bone, Tea,’ has a minor mystery plot and concerns what is functionally a gang war between the Greek and Chinese pantheons that Wong is determined to survive, one way or another. The book closes with a series of epilogues and endings that simultaneously tie-up loose threads and offer possibilities for future sequels.

Khaw’s sharp writing more than makes up for the occasional deficits in plot; Rupert Wong is an engaging smartass of a character you can’t help rooting for, and the sensory details of his cooking are incredibly vivid (and indeed, mouthwatering, at least until you’re reminded that he’s usually cooking that other white meat, human pork). His best moments are when interacting with his undead girlfriend Minah (who is, in case you are wondering, much more interesting and sympathetic than Gaiman’s “dead wife Laura”) and her demonic dead fetus, an ectoplasmic vampire that Wong nicknames George and regularly feeds from a cut on his wrist. Unfortunately, Minah and George are removed from the series early on, though thankfully not to fuel Wong’s arc, and the stories are weaker for it, I think. Wong is at his best when he has someone to riff off of, and it’s only in ‘Meat, Bone, Tea’ when two new characters emerge for this purpose: Fariz, a fellow human in this metaphysical underworld, and Nyarlathotep, a fictional creation of H.P. Lovecraft rendered real through the popularity of the Chthulhu mythos. This is a fascinating idea, and one I wish bumped more against our ideas of mythology: (some of) the Chinese and Greek gods appear with their family dramas more or less intact, and yet somehow still diminished. Would certain other members, like, say, Nike, not be more empowered in our capitalist and overly branded world? What about other fictional characters? Surely Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy would at least be demigods by now?

Ultimately, Food of the Gods is a fast and light read. I feel like the talk-back of Southeast Asian culture never did the work it set out to do, either in London or in Kuala Lumpur, but it nonetheless appears as a counter to the omnipresent Western narratives that tend to dominate Anglo-American genre writing like Gaiman, or more recently, Jo Walton in her Thessaly series, and that’s nonetheless incredibly useful in the ongoing conversations around representation and diversity in genre writing. Khaw’s voice is needed in our discussions of genre and myth, and I look forward to what she comes up with next.