Joel Arnold, $0.99, ISBN 978-1310878138
Horror, 2014
The Toyol is a demon that takes the form of a green baby with fangs and red eyes, sometimes pointed ears too. I’ve never seen one, but I’m pretty sure it looks cute. This cute little thing can be inherited from one generation to another, and it’s a fairly benign thing.
Basically, it will steal stuff money, jewelry, and other shiny stuff for its owner. In return, the owner only has to feed it blood from their thumb daily.
Of course, owning a demon is a sinful thing, and the owner will be damned, blah blah blah, but keeping a pet demon burglar sounds like a decent idea if you ask me.
This brings me to Joel Arnold’s The Toyol.
It’s about Zeya, a teenage girl from Myamar that is lured into promises of honest living in Kuala Lumpur only to learn that she’s going to be held captive by her pimps and made to service various johns without any mercy or reprieve.
The demon baby in the title is basically the diabolus ex machina that will help Zeya be freed from her captors and tormentors, and this is where I have my biggest issue with this story: toyols aren’t violent demonic killers.
Oh, I know, the author has the right to taking creative liberties, but much of the portrayal of the toyol here feels authentic and true to Southeast Asian folk tales, so this is like cheering for a sprinter only to have the poor dear trip and break a hip just a few inches from the finish line.
I’m not sure what to make of this story, to be honest. It’s basically “The perpetual suffering and torment of Zeya until she inadvertently gains a toyol and the toyol sets her free!” and the story is tad too short to be well fleshed out. The demon baby appears too late into the story and rather abruptly too, making the story seem to transition abruptly from thriller to horror in the blink of an eye.
Also, Toyol is not a spook from Myanmar, so having the protagonist to be from there also feels rather weird. Why not have Zeya be from Indonesia instead?
Still, my nitpicking may just go over the heads of people not from Southeast Asia, so perhaps they won’t be distracted by these things as much as I am.
I suppose this story is alright. I don’t particularly love it, but I don’t particularly have any objections to it either, aside from the irregularities when it comes to the toyol lore.
Still, it’s nice to see horror stories based from spooks from this part of the world that isn’t a cringe-filled slapstick comedy, so there’s that!
