I began reading Midnight Doorways: Fables from Pakistan just as the semester settled into its mounting deadlines and shrinking hours. As a result, what free time I usually had was at night, when the roar of trucks and motorcycles with their silencers removed would startle me, and, for a brief moment, I would worry that the horrors I was reading about had escaped the confines of the page and the Pakistan they inhabited was less fictionalized than it appeared.

Usman T Malik’s Midnight Doorways creates a grungy, eerie atmosphere out of both Pakistan’s familiar corners and its shadowy crevices. The collected short stories are full of vivid and tactile details. This proves immensely effective in creating disturbing narratives that stick with the reader – which add to the uncanniness of the tales and ensnare the reader into those worlds. This isn’t dissimilar to how many of the characters in Malik’s stories are bewitched by otherworldly entities.

Many of the stories explore what love and devotion can look like when pushed to the brink and twisted to the extreme. ‘Ishq’, the first story of the collection, explores how that can look through a format that would be familiar to many readers: a mother telling her son a story about her childhood. Set in Lahore during the 60s, Zakir’s ammi recalls the budding romance between her sister and the young shakarkandi vendor that frequented their street. Readers are witness to the lengths the vendor –Hashim – goes to to show his devotion to Parveen, as he continues to love her through her illness and eventual death. Malik displays Hashim’s tenderness for her when they meet beneath a peepal tree, when Hashim sells his bicycle to pay for Parveen’s treatments, and when he refuses to bury her out of empathy for her fear of the dark.

The slow descent into the tragic horror of the family’s situation reaches a breaking point when Zakir’s ammi finally tears Hashim away from the seemingly hollow body of her sister. As the pair escape the flooding alleyways of the neighbourhood, a familiar specter follows close behind.

The transcendence of love through the limits of life and death can be seen in Zakir’s mother, who yearns for the connection to her sister, as she gets older and more ill. This transcendence comes with a sense of mourning, which gets passed down to Zakir who feels it for his mother and the aunt he could never meet. And it’s this which connects the different timelines and sustains the work’s melancholic air.

…the unknown is always present, as “secrets whispered into midnight doorways,” and unfettered devotion can lead to something uncontrollable.

This thrall that devotion can have over a person is also explored in ‘Dead Lovers On Each Blade, Hung’. The story’s format is immediately gripping: an unnamed Heroinchi narrator recounts events to a police inspector, grounding the story in a setting where the supernatural is rarely expected. This frame reasserts itself whenever the narrator, recalling his audience, censors himself to keep from angering the inspector with details of colleagues’ corruption.

While many aspects of ‘Dead Lovers On Each Blade, Hung’ and ‘Ishq’ may seem to resemble each other in style, Malik handles the themes of otherworldly devotion in both stories in completely distinct ways.

The title of the short story collection comes from a section in ‘Dead Lovers’ which gives the sense that the unknown is always present, as “secrets whispered into midnight doorways,” and unfettered devotion can lead to something uncontrollable. The narrator is left irrevocably changed by his encounter with the unknown and supernatural in a way that is different to his substance abuse. Alongside him, there is an older man named Hakim Shafi, who has spent years looking for his missing wife and child bride. The narrator questions the nature of Hakim Shafi’s love and loyalty – what kind of devotion could drive such a prolonged and maddening search? It is that search which eventually leads both characters to interact with something that should have remained hidden in the shadows. Malik allows us to follow the characters in a manner that humanizes them, showcasing the grayness of their morality and refraining from villainizing the characters for their actions (namely Hakeem Shafi’s child marriage and the narrator’s substance abuse). The reader views the story through their own moral lens. Additionally, the atmosphere in this story is so expertly crafted that even in seemingly banal settings there is a sense of foreboding – in one instance, strange children peer at the narrator through windows at an innocuous moment, following behind him at others, and only visible in the periphery of his vision before disappearing.

Malevolent possession and uncanny atmospheres are also explored in the final story of the collection, ‘In The Ruins Of Mohenjadaro’. When a field trip to Mohenjadaro goes awry due to attacks by the Taliban on cadet colleges in the area, the students are forced to stay in the ruins overnight. This unexpected turn of events is made into something more ominous than an inconvenience by references that foreshadow (although a little heavy-handedly at times) the beginnings of something sinister.

The museum curator speaks about people refusing to stay after dark on the Day of the Goat, and another teacher alludes that the ancient inhabitants of the city had abandoned it because of something more devastating than a natural disaster. Throughout it all, the protagonist Noor is beset by migraines, an early period, and the pull to painful memories from her past, more strongly than she had ever experienced before.

‘The Ruins’ features the recurring motif of a sacrificial goat, and it becomes more apparent – as the story progresses – that this is a motif applicable to Noor and her situation. That imaging is also seen in a ghost story she tells the students as they camp out by a fire, which is mirrored in the last section of the story.

Malik shows readers sympathetic and human aspects of the characters, which make the casualties amassed in the narrative all the more devastating in their impact. If there was one thing I could criticize about this story, it is that a woman’s chest can be referred to as just that, and lines like “Noor wanted to scream, to slap her breasts…” somewhat take me out of the flow of the narrative.

While most of the stories in the collection fit together comfortably, ‘Resurrection Points’ could have benefitted from an expansion – I know I would enjoy spending more time in the setting and with the premise, and seeing what happens past where the story cuts off could allow for a more in-depth exploration of the shift in identity the protagonist feels.

Interfaith discrimination, the dangers of extremism, and the constrictions of patriarchy, among others, are issues that are commented on in these stories through the vehicle of the supernatural. Overall, Midnight Doorways spotlights the overlooked, shadowy elements of Pakistani surroundings, visualizes them, then heightens it all with the possibilities of the unseen. Malik unsettles the reader not just with the horror of the “what if?” but also with the horror of what is already there, very much real, and sticks around even when lights come back on.