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Campus Ghosts

 

Book Review



Title: Young Blood

Author: Chandrima Das

Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2021


People enjoy reading horror fiction or watching horror movies because the emotional roller coaster rides provided by them are delightfully scary while being mere illusions. Chandrima Das’s short stories in the collection titled Young Blood are brilliant creations based on certain legends and beliefs particularly on ten Indian university campuses. Every story in this book succeeds remarkably well in creating tension, fear, stress and shock in the reader. Moreover, they have some very memorable characters.

The stories are all set in a university campus – ranging from the defunct Khairatabad Science College in Hyderabad to the sanctimonious St Anthony’s College premises in Shillong. Each story is unique too. If a whole college building becomes a monstrous and gigantic ghost in the first story, a witch (chudail) haunts us in the second, and one’s own inner demons apparently metamorphose into ghosts in another, and so on.

One of the delightful charms of this book is the way the characters are shaped by the author as well as their own pasts. Das gives a very realistic and convincing background to each of the major characters who are haunted by the ghosts in the tales. Aditi of St Bede’s College, Shimla (second story), seems to invoke upon herself the ghost that haunts her with all the pent-up negativity of hers. Are the ghosts who attack Nirav and Pavitra in the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur (fifth story), conjured up by their own mutual misgivings?

One of the bonuses of these horror tales is that they force us to look into our own hearts too sometimes. Are we nurturing a devil somewhere down there, in one of the dark chambers of our heart?

Not all of the ghosts we encounter here are malicious. The ghost on the campus of Fergusson College, Pune (6th story), is very benign at least to the protagonist. Manisha is in a terrible condition having lost her father and with her mother lying in coma in the ICU of a hospital. She is running out of money. Vishesh, her boyfriend, helps her but he is a psychotic of sorts. It is her helplessness that keeps Manisha glued to Vishesh and it takes the ghost of Jhanvi to make her realise that “love is not control.” After all, Jhanvi was killed by her own boyfriend on the campus.

Chandrima Das is dexterous with the creation of not only characters that haunt us as eerily as the ghosts that haunt them but also the setting and environment. The putrid odour of Khairatabad lingers with us much after we leave it at the end of the story. The “dozens and dozens of bloated maggots wriggling in unison” in the mouth of Ashutosh Mukherjee of ‘Ghost of a Chance’ (8th story) will haunt the feeble-hearted for long.

However, it is not just terror that Chandrima Das presents us. She works with a whole range of human emotions from love and hatred to jealousy and rivalry. Along with the moments of pure and utter fear lie moments of stillness. That is where Das emerges as an effective story-teller.

The book is a delectable pick for those who love horror fiction.

PS. This review is powered by Blogchatter Book Review Program

Order your copy at Amazon India

Comments

  1. Pooja MahimkarDecember 26, 2021 at 4:50 PM

    I generally dont want horror movies because I am easily scared. But I do pick a horror book once in a while, because I can just put it down when scared. Guess this would be my scary book of 2022

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 27, 2021 at 7:04 AM

      I am not fond of horror fiction too though as a young man I used to enjoy it particularly the Dracula variety.

      Delete

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