Excerpt from A COMPENDIUM OF SUPERNATURAL ENTITIES FOUND IN THE GOVERNMENT GIRLS HIGHER SECONDARY SCHOOL by Kuzhali Manickavel:
For the most part, Thamarai liked the new town. It initially seemed harmless, like a very old house. But strange things began to happen to her. Sometimes it was just unlucky strangeness: a pig would get its head stuck in the spokes of her cycle or a family of ravens would consecutively poop on her head. Other events were inexplicable: a crowd of children who all had hands where their heads should have been had once chased her while she cycled to school. Another time, while fishing in her bag for her pen, she had repeatedly pulled out handfuls of old teeth which tried to bury themselves into her palm like they were shy. There was the young man who had grabbed her arm at the railway crossing and then dissolved into a cloud of reddish dust. Another day, she had been alone at home when she had stumbled into a wall and remained stuck inside it for the whole afternoon.
And of course there was the incident with the old woman at maths tuition, which Thamarai did not like to think about.
The very first of Thamarai’s supernatural experiences took place a couple of weeks after moving, on her first day of 9th standard. There had been no room for her in the classroom, so she had been relegated to sitting on the floor in the doorway. No one spoke to her, but everyone stared at her. She looked like them, but she was clearly not one of them; she was too well-nourished to be one of these girls—these girls with their anaemia, their fluoride-stained teeth, and their holes in their hearts.
She spent most of that day looking at the empty assembly ground that stretched hopelessly in front of the classroom. She memorised the pockmarks and scratches on the wall in front of her—the one crack that looked like a horse’s head, the other that looked like a laughing clown. She counted the tiny holes in the floor and the mounds of dust that lay nestled at the bottom of the door.
Feeling the stares of the girls around her, she decided to rummage through her bag like she was searching for something important. Inside was a cheap, plastic raincoat, a geometry box, her unused rough notebook, her new textbooks… and something else. She frowned as she gingerly pulled out a very old and dusty botany record notebook.
She had never seen it before. Its binding was falling apart, but somehow the book seemed to be holding itself together. Thamarai looked around her to see if someone had put it in her bag by accident. A prank maybe?
She opened the notebook and saw intricate transectional sketches. These were not the usual drawings of shoeflowers and seed germination. Some of the diagrams looked like young girls and others looked like gigantic insects. The text portions almost read like botanical entries, except that they included warnings and danger rankings.
It’s just a book, she said to herself. I am not afraid of it. I’m not afraid of anything here. She leaned over and placed the notebook on the floor, next to the wall. Someone would eventually pick it up and deal with it.
She went back to staring outside.
Sometime later, when she looked in her bag again, there was the notebook, nestled under her plastic raincoat. For the next half hour, she kept putting the notebook on the floor against the wall, and it kept reappearing in her bag when she wasn’t looking.
She decided she would toss it in the drainage canal on her way home.
But after school, as she slowed her pace near the canal, someone chased her away, saying it was dangerous, and didn’t she have enough sense to stay away from places like that?
No matter what she tried, she could not get rid of the notebook. It became a silent, permanent fixture in her bag.
From A COMPENDIUM OF SUPERNATURAL ENTITIES FOUND IN THE GOVERNMENT GIRLS HIGHER SECONDARY SCHOOL by Kuzhali Manickavel. Copyright © 2026 by the author, and reprinted with permission.
A boundary-pushing fantasy that blends magical realism with dark academia, perfect for fans of Bunny by Mona Awad and Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth.
In the oppressive heat of a small Tamil Nadu town, strange happenings are common. And the local government secondary school is teeming with supernatural entities.
For Thamarai, an outsider considered strange by her peers, life is dreary and frustrating. She endures nosy neighbours and incomprehensible tuition classes. She despises the way her lecherous English teacher harasses the other girls in her grade. But when Thamarai finds a mysterious notebook full of descriptions of the school's paranormal phenomena, she wonders if it may hold the key to escape...
Fantasy Dark | Fantasy Magical Realism [ Watkins Publishing, On Sale: October 6, 2026, Paperback / e-Book, ISBN: 9781915998866 / eISBN: 9781915998873 ]
Kuzhali Manickavel's collections Things We Found During the Autopsy, Insects Are Just like You and Me Except Some of Them Have Wings, and Conversations Regarding the Fatalistic Outlook of the Common Man, as well as chapbooks and ezines, are all available from Blaft. Kuzhali lives in Bengaluru, India.
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