Written by: Nahal Sheikh
Posted on: February 17, 2021 | 
Usman Malik at the Book Launch of 'Midnight Doorways' in Lahore
After weeks of planning, author Usman T. Malik and I finally sat across from each other virtually. The nervousness immediately eased into friendly exchange. Perhaps it was the warm chai that helped or Malik’s calm humility as he talked about his work. Although this interview is about his newly launched book, ‘Midnight Doorways: Fables from Pakistan' (2020), we ended up covering a great deal about the nature of strange fiction, and the importance of finding new stories to tell about our current times.
The Book Cover
Lauded for his achievements as a widely published author of South Asian origin, I was curious where on the literary genre spectrum Malik places himself. Is he a speculative fiction (spec-fic), science fiction (sci-fi), fantasy or horror writer? Or is the setting of such boundaries a limiting way of seeing himself and his writings?
We first played around with the terms ‘spec-fic’ and ‘sci-fi’ since these are challenging terms to define. “This question keeps coming up again and again throughout the history of modern literature,” he says. In an article called Rockets, robots, and reckless imagination, Malik explains how we can define the genres and comprehend their role in society. In short, “science fiction and speculative fiction pushes at the boundaries of knowledge.”
This can entail fantasy, magic realism, mystery, horror and any story that pushes the boundaries of realism. A writer who reflects on their environment by ambitiously imagining un-real elements around an incident, protagonist or object is actively participating in this particularly strange world of fiction. Within this vast sphere, Malik stands somewhere in the middle, perhaps on the ‘darker’ side. “I strongly identify as a horror writer...because I write a lot of dark fiction and that’s probably my home-ground.”
Usman Malik and Neil Gaiman in 2013
The Horror genre is not historically popular in South Asia, but is slowly creating a presence for itself. Malik is influenced by writers from the 80’s and 90’s like Dougal E. Winter, Tom F. Monteleone, Stephen King, Clive Barker and more. Their similarities are perfectly articulated in the introduction of an anthology that Winter edited called Prime Evil, “Horror is not a genre, it is an emotion.” At first, this was a strange statement to hear, but the more I saw Malik thread his relationship to horror, the more it made sense to perceive it as an emotion. When reading a horror story, readers feels on edge, anxious, terrified, and feeble, but they are ready to defend themselves from a creature. That thing may be lurking behind them or a metaphorical beast representing their anxiety. For Malik, “this is why horror is such an interesting, inescapable genre.”
He points out how a lot of horror literature derives from a sense of the ‘uncanny’ or a feeling “that something is off.” In modern strange fiction, this can be defined by Freud’s essay in 1919 called The “Uncanny”, “[It] is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.”
An Illustration from 'Midnight Doorways'
What feels uncanny could be a manifestation of that which was once suppressed or hidden. For him, this is where one can create meaningful stories. “I’m really drawn to [...] the humanity of these stories and these characters, the humanity of everyday people in Pakistan who experience the uncanny. I enjoy spending time with the ‘raddiwala’ (the garbage collector) more than a bureaucrat. That’s something that’s always drawn me, and I think that seeps into my horror stories as well, and turns it into something more.”
Malik prefers capturing ordinary people living in society, although horror fiction does not necessarily have to convey a moral or political message. It is simply about returning to an unreal element and giving an insight into the mundaneness of human condition, since “the best horror is human.” The stories are often character-driven rather than ideology-driven, so that readers are free to interpret the narrative in different ways. This is the beauty of horror: if you push boundaries and leave it open to interpretation, horror becomes a completely different lens of looking at the world.
Growing up in Lahore, Malik’s literary identity is deeply rooted in Pakistani poetry, folklore and urban legends. He keeps coming back to these sources, some of which are inspiration for his short story collection, Midnight Doorways: Fables from Pakistan. Reminiscing about the magazines he read as a child, like “Bachon Ki Dunya”, “Bachon Ka Baagh” and “Jugnoo”, he wants younger generations today to relate to the Pakistani-centric worlds he creates. “When I wrote the novella The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn, I paid a visit to Lahore and walked in the inner city to get the feel of the place. So, I write stories set in places I know about. If I feel rooted in the story, then the reader will also find them credible and be able to believe them.”
The Pauper, Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn's Book Cover
Malik maintains this literary approach in his latest book, with stories that include a Lahori orphanage for girls being haunted by birds and eerie visions; two lovers adrift amidst rising floodwaters in the 1960s; a woman situated in a pre-Islamic city chaperoning a school trip while facing ancient horrors, as boys start going missing. He explains how the book tries to fill up the spaces in his stories with memorabilia that he knows. The architecture, aesthetics, characters, language, imagery of his conceived world represents the lived realities of people in Pakistan. “You know, we’ve heard so many stories about terrorism and wars, so I wanted to write something that would be slightly different. These fables that I wrote borrow from a huge reservoir of myth, techniques, terrors, fears and hope that Pakistanis have harbored for the last twenty years.”
Malik has a point, literature coming from Pakistan does not have to limit itself to war, terrorism and political strife. Writers can push the boundaries of realism and experiment with the current issues of our society and the world. “You can’t help but be part of this sort of literature anymore, if at one point Partition was our reality, now technology is the dominant reality. So, how can you not respond to the threat of climate change, artificial intelligence or the extinction of species?”
Usman Malik with some of the illustrators of 'Midnight Doorways'
A literary initiative led by Malik and others, The Salam Award, promotes writers to experiment with everything from sci-fi, steampunk, magical realism to weird fiction. Such projects show how so many people are eager to coalesce together into a literary force, but need access to the space and knowledge for entering the publishing industry. “We ‘desis’ (South Asians) have lived with a colonial hangover for too long where we are told that editors will have issues with the way we write,” says Malik. It might be time to change this, moving on to create space for fresher, newer stories.
‘Midnight Doorways’ is now available for sale in Pakistan and abroad. For more updates, please visit Usman Malik’s website, or follow him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
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