From beyond the grave to beyond galaxies

Book Review

Sitharaam Jayakumar

This is a collection of short stories numbering to over thirty. They are divided into five categories: Horror/thriller; Sci-fi/humour; Sci-fi/public welfare; Sci-fi/miscellaneous; and General. Sitharaam Jayakumar, the author, is an accomplished storyteller who has published a couple of short novels.

The first section in this collection is likely to remind the reader of Somerset Maugham with a hangman’s noose. The stories in this section reek of cynicism as they narrate stories of human wickedness. Betrayal and fraudulence are the themes of these stories. The wife is unfaithful to the husband or vice-versa and then one goes to the extent of murdering the other. In a few stories the ghost of the murdered person returns to take revenge. Jai (as the author is known among his friends) builds up the whole plot so adeptly that the conclusion lands on our face like an unexpected slap. He is also an expert at creating the apt environment. There is an eerie feeling dominating most of these stories. See the opening sentence of the first story, ‘I will always be with you’: “I climbed up the steep mountain slope moving away from the burning wreck of the car I had left my wife Kathy’s dead body in.” Or look at this from another one: “The tale went that the last occupant of the villa was a failed painter couple who lived there as recluses.”

The stories grouped together under ‘Sci-fi/Humour’ can make us smile with humanoids that behave like real humans. Romeo and Juliet in ‘Give me five!’ and Andrei and Steffi in ‘The Five-Set Thriller’ are humanoids with a nice sense of romance. The irony of our possible future falling back on the past of Swift’s Gulliver as hinted at in ‘The Evacuation’ is also amusing.

The third section tries to convey some serious messages. ‘Lesser of two evils’ has a superior extra-terrestrial creature throwing out some serious warnings to the homo sapiens on earth who have destroyed the planet enough already. ‘Four corners of the world’ is a powerful plea in favour of women. A humanoid in ‘The Peace-Queen’ has better sense than his actual human creator.

‘Adam and Eve’ in the fourth section tells us about a possible end of the earth. Ironically two scientists named Adam and Eve – one each from America and Russia – begin the human race once again on another planet. The last stories in the collection make up for all the cynicism that oozes out of the first section. A touch of spirituality graces some of these pages too.

Jai sustains the reader’s interest throughout and that is one of his strengths as a storyteller. The stories in the first section of this volume are meant to shock and horrify and hence the cynicism in them cannot be blamed. The stories grow into increasing sobriety as we move on.

The collection can be downloaded here: Jai’s Assorted Tales

My contribution to the series to which Jai’s book belongs is: Great Books for Great Thoughts