Basket
Anguli Ma
A Gothic TaleAnguli Ma is the central figure in a traditional Buddhist folktale, a deranged killer who wears his victims’ fingers in a garland around his neck.
Chi Vu presents him as a menacing abattoir worker who carries bloody chunks of meat home to his lodgings in plastic bags, in this suburban Gothic tale set in 1980s Melbourne, when the flight of Vietnamese refugees to Australia was at its height.
The gathering fear, the prevailing darkness, the strange contours of the house which has been divided and sub-divided to accommodate its female occupants, the macabre humour and surreal effects, mark Chi Vu’s novella out as a unique contribution to contemporary Australian storytelling, and our understanding of its communities.
SHORTLISTED: NSW Premier’s Literary Awards
I was haunted by Chi Vu’s Anguli Ma: A Gothic Tale, set in Melbourne’s Vietnamese community in the 1980s. It is fresh and disturbing.
The Australian
Chi finds a perfect chemistry between Australia’s history of serial killers in decrepit suburban wastelands and a refugee community’s repressed memories. It is genuinely terrifying.
Delia Falconer
The writing in Anguli Ma has an extraordinary specificity of texture, mood, and angle of vision, as Chi Vu moves back and forth between close attention to realistic detail and hyperreal, noir, hallucinogenic coloration… The trauma it narrates is stitched into domestic suburban ordinariness with dark, sharp brilliance, to produce ‘a jewel of terror’. That is Chi Vu’s highly original achievement.
Nicholas Jose
