Come Tomorrow: And Other Tales of Bangalore Terror

by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy

Ghost stories within ghost stories, shadows from the past and strange intimations from the cosmos converge with the shifting realities of the city of Bangalore in this collection of lyrical, haunting short stories. There are shades of Lovecraft, Ligotti and Aickman, but most of all these stories seek to capture something of the layered, uncanny nature of the city they are set in. Let Jayaprakash Satyamurthy be your guide on a tour of the bean town that might change you forever.

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Weird Fiction, India

154 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 2, 2020

About the author

I read, I write, I play the bass guitar. Reality isn't and stories won't save you from what is. But still.

I live in Bangalore, India with my wife Yasmine and a hoard of feline masterminds as well as a handful of daft dogs.

Reviews

[Raksha Bhat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Weird fiction or weirder reality, the city of Bangalore is seeing the latter from many years, every aspect of the city is resurfacing more so during this COVID-19 Pandemic.

As Jayaprakash Satyamurthy rightly writes in this collection of stories “There are places in Bangalore that are not Bangalore”. Layers within layers, the unsettling entropy and a sense of calm living together. Has any other city in this world seen this kind of coexistence, ghosts of the past and devils of the future? And what a book I picked up to read about the city at this time, thank you The Bookworm🐛😃

The stories in this book take you through the soul of the city, its hollowed existence and attempts at succeeding in life. Temples of hope like Plague Maramma, and even COVID Virusamma might spring up very soon in every nook and corner. My personal favorite amongst the stories in this book is ‘A Threshold Hypothesis’ and the line that impressed me the most

‘The city is in your bones now and you can see under its skin”

The 'ನಾಳೆ ಬಾ' (Naale ba) urban legend of a lady of the paranormal world in Bangalore did inspire a movie titled स्त्री (Stree) in Hindi a couple of years ago, but what are we really looking forward to in this city in the coming tomorrow?

Something to ponder about.

[Donald Armfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

Satyamurthy plays on dread, obscurity and weird fiction. This collection is a traveling Bangalore adventure from the shadows of the uncanny and ghostly vision through the eyes of the native man himself.
Previously, I read most of these stories from his other collections and a very proud owner of both books.
Favorite story from this collection
Shadow Me No More

[David Agranoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR BELOW...

It is a strange effect of the internet age when people you have never met in person feel like a close friends after years of online interaction. This author is one of those for me. Jayaprakash Satyamurthy is a writer based in Bangalore India but is someone whose opinions I have always respected. He and I have much in common. We both have homes filled with rescued animals, are vegan, love Black Sabbath, old school science fiction, and writing weird shit. So why has it taken me this long to read his work? Good question as he has even been a guest on Dickheads for our Counterclock World episode.

I never had that fear that he wouldn’t be a good writer, So it is no shock that Come Tomorrow is a great collection of powerful writing deserving more attention. I want to be careful here and I think I need to approach an issue that I know Jayaprakash has addressed recently as well.

I read plenty of old school so with newer genre fiction I do at times choose work many times passed on writer's whose company I enjoy. I also try to balance the overly white-male problem of genre fiction. As an Indian writer Satyamurthy has made clear there is a fine line when writing about his hometown where you can feel western readers having a gee-whiz reaction to reading about “exotic” locations that can feel icky. The reality is I like reading the local flare of authors from anywhere, Jayaprakash in India, N.K. Jemison in New York City or Joe Lansdale in East Texas.

I like geography in fiction, so I have to say I like that Satyamurthy’s stories in this collection have a grounded feeling in his city, one obviously I know little about. The reality is that feeling melted to the background and is way down the list of reasons I LOVED this book. I got into the stories that surprisingly connect subtle ways I found the setting really invisible at times. I have a favorite but all 10 stories contain a powerful evident on every page. The book gives indications of influence often there are moments of cosmic dread that recall Lovecraft of course, but also Weird Tales greats like Aickman and Clark Aston Smith. Also moments mundane cracks of reality more in line with the Philip K Dick influence I can’t help that see.

The book opens with the title story which has a ghost story inside of a ghost story set-up and brings moments of cosmic dread when you are not expecting it. The first of many powerful moments that highlight Satyamurthy’s power for building comes in this story. A character is having a nightmare that they are covered in rats.

“The sun rose, and set, and rose again, many times over, but the rats still covered me, a foul cloak that adhered to me no matter what I did, and I could not make out the streets I was running through were.”

That is one hell of an evocative sentence. Very few writers can say so much and pack so much vibe into a single sentence. The second story presents a really powerful kind of paranoia in a character who is driven mad by an intense form of pattern recognition. It is subtle but the story manages to create a hopeless pull in the patterns. The character refers to his marvelous terrible brain. I think many of who writers of dark fiction can relate to that. This is a powerful story that I found myself re-reading when working on this review.

My favorite story in the collection is “Shadow Me No More.” This is a powerful weird tale that could also be described as surreal horror. I loved every strange word of this paranoid story of a person haunted by their shadow. “I can’t grab my shadow’s throat, can’t shut up what never makes a noise. He follows me everywhere and I can’t help but read the terrible knowledge we share in his swagger, his svelte glide, his smooth traverse across the wall and pavement, poster and window, puddle and cowpat. I can’t help detect smug, subtle mockery as languidly oozes from my feet when the sun is angled and the shadows are long.”

From start to finish this was my favorite story. Of course, I like the music and metal references in “No More Iron Crosses.” Since I was listening to music as I was reading I could turn on the Massive Attack song mentioned in the story and this provided a nice synergy. Also when in the next story Axes of Discordance the character started a band I turned the band Satyamurthy plays bass in Djinn and Miskatonic and that helped create a great vibe.

I am not sure what it says thematically but several of the characters have careers or jobs in advertising. There are small tiny connections in the stories but mostly they stand on their own. The comparisons to great writers like Thomas Liggoti and Laird Barron are fair. There is a similar level of quality. Readers looking for that cosmic level of dread combined with razor-sharp wordsmithing and uncanny knack for looking at the weird bubbles floating up in our reality then Come Tomorrow is worth every penny spent or minute of attention given.

Podcast interview!

https://youtu.be/NueYH1EH63Q

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast...

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

In an old interview from the 1990s, filmmaker Quentin Tarantino made the following remark in regards to the internationality of crime films: "The thing about crime films, in particular, is that the yakuza movies they make in Japan, the triad movies they make in Hong Kong, the Italian mafia movies, Jean-Pierre Melville's films in France . . . the thing is, we're all telling the same stories, but we're all telling them differently, because we're all from different cultures, different nationalities, and that's what's really interesting to me, how different cultures attack the same story." I think the same sentiment can also be applied to the horror tale (and all its numerous subcategories: Body Horror, the ghost story, Weird Fiction, whatever), to perhaps an even greater extent than the crime genre, because fear is, of course, a universal feeling, perhaps one of THE most universal feelings there is. H.P. Lovecraft once famously observed that "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." And in one of my own novels, I once stated, "Fear transcends all racial, cultural, sociological and economic boundaries: fear is what unites the human race as a species." And yet, geographically speaking, horror writers have oft tended to be parochial creatures, content to dwell in limited environs where they mine their veins; one thinks of Lovecraft's New England, Machen's haunted Wales and secret London, Stephen King's Maine, and so on. A lot of these writers were exploring the same territory, but because of how they went about it and other factors (based on their nationality, their backgrounds, and personal character, to cite just a few), the end result was often wildly different.

I mention all this because I had Tarantino's comment on the back of my mind while reading Jayaprakash Satyamurthy's collection COME TOMORROW AND OTHER TALES OF BANGALORE TERROR. As the title indicates, the stories in this collection are set in the city of Bangalore in India, and in terms of subject matter they explore of the tropes one tends to come across in the horror genre: ghosts, haunted houses, serial killers, witches, the occult, necromancy, toys coming to life, monsters from other dimensions, and things of that nature. But here, as seen through the prism of the author's own cultural background and the various references to life in Bangalore (cantonments, temples humming bhajans, Bollywood songs, Diwali, and so forth), they have a veneer of freshness . . . some highlights include "The Song of the Eukarya," which deals with a parasitical infestation and which is, I suppose, the most Lovecraftian story present here (and which brought to my mind his "The Colour Out of Space"), and "A Threshold Hypothesis," in which the narrator discovers in Bangalore various threshold points, places in the city where the past leaks into the present, like a form of "ethereal playback." Also very good is "The Toys Are Moving," which concerns itself with a narrator who collects discarded objects that once belonged to other people, as it has some nice images, such as "Refrigerators stand like obelisks to freshness, a Stonehenge of washing machines and freezers."

Many of the narrators of these stories are office workers, graphic designers, programmers or admen, but some are musicians as well, and a few stories are set in various musical subcultures (the author's bio on the back cover mentions how he is a musician in a doom metal band). The best of these stories, "Axes of Discordance," is also the collection's longest tale, at just under 40 pages. The main villain in it is an evil drummer who dabbles in black magic (as you might expect from this, the author is a guitarist), but to me what sells the story is that I was really invested in the characters. Oftentimes in the horror short tale one doesn't always get too attached to the main character(s), because there's always the knowledge in the back of one's mind that they'll most likely come to a gruesome fate by the story's end. But with "Axes of Discordance," I liked the main characters and wanted them to make it through okay, and I can't say that's a feeling I experience very often when reading a Weird tale.

[Jake Beka · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cosmic horror, ghost stories, amazing literary references, and heavy metal music; what’s not to love? In all seriousness though, this book was fantastic. Really inspiring too. I haven’t read a “horror” book in a while, and in particular, ghost tales, and this one might be my new all time favourite collection of short stories. I really love his evocation of Bangalore. Again, awe-inspiring as a writer myself.

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent collection of horror and weird fiction that draws strength and texture by firmly rooting the proceedings in Bangalore. Setting is crucial in horror, and particularly in the first several stories, aspects of Bangalore seem to emanate a palpable menace that casts a darker glow on the lives of the characters. What we get is a strong collection of short horror, with a range of themes and tones, all tightly bound to its setting.

As a Western reader with fairly limited experience with horror stories set in India, I’ll own my ignorance and admit I was vaguely reminded at times of Dan Simmons’ Song of Kali, which is set in Kolkata but framed through an extremely Western lens. (Don’t get me started on latter-day Simmons and his sneering barely masked racism and homophobia.)But where that novel leaned heavily on the notion of an outsider falling prey to a (racist, emotionally manipulative) fever dream of culture shock taken to the worst possible outcome, the horror in this collection feels entirely different, despite a similar reliance on what I think of as “place-based horror”. Parts of Bangalore, in this telling, have an almost miasmic effect; worlds collide in strange ways, across time and thin dimensional veils; ghosts and magic and darker things abound. It’s horror of a quieter sort, mostly, but highly entertaining. The texture of Bangalore gives it a different kind of glow than similar tales set in Arkham, let’s say.

Also nice to see heavy metal (and extreme metal) represented properly in fiction, a true rarity. The author plays in a metal band (the exquisitely named Djinn and Miskatonic) signed to a great Mumbai-based label with international reach (shout out to Kunal of Transcending Obscurity Records). The lived experience with metal and music generally bleeds into the text jn a very good way. (Hails.) Very curious if they ever had a “drummer from hell” that inspired the closing tale...

Altogether recommended. There are a few ups and downs, and I preferred some of the earlier stories the most, but the varied approach made for an extremely readable collection with no dead weight.

[Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a solid collection of trancelike urban horror stories. The stories present themselves planted in the ultra contemporary culture of Bangalore, yet the underlying magic and mysticism comes off like a Ligotti sleepwalking nightmare through the mundane day-to-day lifestyle. Everything is so normalized that when the horror happens it comes across with Lafcadio Hearn vibes how it's all just "folklore" come to life and everyone kind of half expects something supernatural is afoot.

It's like, how can anyone cope with wild hauntings or a confrontation with a warlock other than accepting that you have to deal with it eventually, but schoolwork is building up, or you know, you can't just not show up to work. Reality warps around the paranormal in really compelling ways. The horror just constantly peeks around the edges.

Some of the stories are very loosely connected, but while the stories are absolutely stand alone, the whole collection does feel like a complete piece in tone.

I'll be on the look out for his other releases.

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some quiet terrors & then something different...

The first four stories were from “Weird Tales of the Bangolorean.” The rest were from another chapbook yours truly has yet to find. Most of the stories were of spectral quietude, and genuine weirdness. And two others were crossed over to splatterpunk territory. These stories question realities you’re in, these dark cosmic terrors. One can never be sure whether the protagonist would survive or not. But regardless, this writer knew how to draw the reader in. Recommended.

[HSB · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a child, my best (worst?) nightmares didn't end when I woke up - they'd leave me with a nightmare tinged filter that I view the world through, a sense that my half-remembered fears were playing out at the corner of my eye, daring me to look. This usually lasted for at least the next day, or if I was really badly afflicted an entire week.

This story collection processes Bangalore through a similar filter and I wager whatever you thought about Bangalore - assuming you thought of it at all - it will alter the way you see the city. This is irrespective of whether you are of the vintage that regarded it through the cliched lens of a pensioner's paradise (now paradise lost) or the more contemporary but equally cliched 'startup central'.

Come Tomorrow brings with it the random disconcerting suddenness of an acquaintance you've just been introduced to in a bar offering you a hilariously inaccurate palm reading (something that actually happened to me in Bangalore).

The title story, one of my all time favourites, takes the popular Indian urban legend of a ghost who can be dissuaded by a request to 'come tomorrow' scrawled on the door, adds to it the pathos of a family slipping through the safety net of the comfort and privilege afforded by a upwardly mobile middle class existence. It's such a perfect exploration of the theme, does so many things with it, and goes so many places, in the best way possible, it feels more like music than writing.

It's left me with the conviction that any attempt at taking on this particular myth again will be an act of hubris and folly (I was proved right in this by the almost terminally unwatchable Stree, a Bollywood film that took on this concept in what felt like a maliciously inept and awful manner).

Through the rest of the stories, characters undergo terrifying transformations, slip out of the world entirely - staring balefully at a life they are permanently excluded from, find the city being haunted by itself, and in turn are haunted by this act of knowing.

Come Tomorrow leaves you with a terrifying sense of what if the most fanciful tall tales of the city you live in, that you are told in pubs, and at boring house parties by garrulous bullshitters, are in fact true? One of the numerous 'story within a story' segments ends with the narrator having no recollection of the story he just told. It disturbed me more than I can convey, leaving me with an ill defined sense of deja vu of something similar that actually happened, but evades my memory.

A loose interlinking binds several of the stories together - some of the connections are obvious and stated upfront, others are either incredibly subtle or the product of reading too much into the text - great fun either way. If the influences of Lovecraft and Ligotti are evident, they only to remind you of how well they are subsumed and surpassed by the writing on Come Tomorrow.

The last couple of stories break from the sequence, and without getting into spoiler territory, Axes of Discordance, a fantastic narrative about among other things, the redemptive power of music, even lets a glimmer of light and hope shine through.

[Becca · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a gem. It was an unexpected find and while I love horror, I've mostly stepped away from the genre lately due to oversaturation of mediocre fiction. I tend to read mostly nonfiction these days but picked this up out of curiosity and was greatly rewarded.

Last year I read an anthology of Japanese ghost stories (Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaidan) which took me to a land and time far from the chaotic pandemic and political stresses in 2020 America. This book also transported me, this time to a more modern day Bangalore, but with enough pop culture references to allow me to identify more with the characters (Iron Maiden, Slayer, H.P. Lovecraft...)

Most of these stories reminded me in general of things like hanging out with my friends, garage band practices of the 80s and 90s, drinking in pubs, curiously reading from the Simon Necronomicon. Some things are just so similar across cultures, across the world.

The ghost story/paranormal elements are fascinating and well done. All the stories have an interconnectedness between them that flows well and enabled me to feel a familiarity with the places and characters after a while. The writing is a notch above - several times I looked up rarely used words that rolled off the page perfectly (and expanded my vocabulary).

I highlighted several passages, but this is probably the one that spoke to me most directly, and felt tailored to this specific moment in time:

"I think people have a huge need for normalcy, especially when things are clearly off-key, and that’s why most of society remains quiet and calm while holocausts happen all around them, that’s why all those horror movies where people keep ignoring the terrible things stalking them until it’s too late aren’t really that unrealistic."

And thematically, this particular passage not only describes a major aspect of the collection of stories, but also a feeling I get sometimes just existing in real life:

"It seemed to me that the city was like an old videotape which has been recorded over too many times on a crummy old VCR, and sometimes the old picture shows through. These were echoes of people and things from long ago. It was just ethereal playback, that was all."

What shadows of memories do we tread on every day, just going about our lives?

[Swathi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gosh! What a captivating read this was, filled with horror stories that were not just horror but somehow had a sense of calm. Everyone story seeped into the other, characters emerged and moved around, and gave the feeling that the stories in the dark world are safe too. The death metal references were too good, I learnt about a few new ones —the writer being a musician lent so much authenticity to those references and experiences in the stories. Some stories took a sharp rise and then dropped softly while the others left me thinking if we really coexist with these 'things' without us knowing. The last short story took the cake. I couldn't lift my eyes off my kindle, and really wanted to know how it ended. The callback to the name of the book left me with goosebumps. So good.

[Amrutha Prasad · Rating 1 out of 5]

Lmao wtf was this??? One star just for the last story that actually made sense, had a plot, and interestingly, captured the metalhead culture of my high school and other such vibes rather well. While the stories all build on each other in some way most of them don’t make any sense and don’t really feature the haunting or the ghosts the back of the book promises.

[Jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Satyamurthy’s phantasmagoric tales leap off the page with characters that feel grounded and real. Referencing everyone from Robert Louis Stevenson to Slayer and Massive Attack and having a painterly touch with his vocabulary doesn’t hurt either…

[subzero · Rating 3 out of 5]

Horrifying tales. Strong recommend for horror fans. I do not usually read horror and I am not going to for some time now.

[Katherine Kitchener · Rating 5 out of 5]

Weird, creepy and beautifully balanced. A very satisfying read.

[Shazzie]

DNF @ chapter 2

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was awesome. I really enjoyed it!

This writer's style is very unique. If you want a light read that has some philosophical aspects and poetic aspects then this is the choice for you.