Blaft Publications’ penchant for literary anomalies has solidified into a reputation for genre fiction, their catalogues featuring the speculative, pulpy, weird, and fantastic. Bandigoat: A Collection of Strange and Horrible Tales is the latest addition to this publisher’s repertoire, hosting some regulars, chief of whom may very well be the inimitable Kuzhali Manickavel, alongside Blaft co-founder Rashmi Ruth Devadasan, and some familiar and up-and-coming names in the wide field of horror.
The collection takes its name from a cross-bred, chimeric hybrid of the bandicoot rat and a goat, presented in the introduction as the figment of a child’s imagination spurred on by the half-shadowed, scuttling movement of something strange in the night and some amusing language games, saturated with history. Misha Michael does a memorable job of illustrating this fictious being into life, lined in acid green on the cover, evoking something of the ridiculousness and danger of imaginary friends and nonsense verse. The introduction, written by Rakesh Khanna, co-founder with Devadasan and Michael, is itself a curious thing. It unfolds as a vignette at a literary agent’s office, selling to her/us the idea of the book. Something self-referential about the publisher’s bid for the strange and the horrific (not all horror, more-or-less-than horror)...
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