David Kendall, the former creator and host of the MTV alt.rock show  “120 Minutes,” gives the Phantom Lover collection of horror and noir a four-star review in the South China Morning Post, Asia’s biggest English-language daily, in its January 3, 2015 edition.  

Asian horror fiction is an expanding, yet still relatively unknown genre. Its rise follows the trend for Southeast Asia noir, and an increasing number of movies that use Bangkok’s sultry streets as a backdrop for tales of crime and the supernatural. But Jim Algie’s short-story collection, The Phantom Lover and Other Thrilling Tales of Thailand, aims to go further, tapping into the deep vein of superstition that runs through Thai society and blurring the line between precarious reality and a disturbing dream world.

Algie’s stories are not for the squeamish. A failed snake handler, body disfigured by cobra bites, ruminates on life’s disappointments, while a Bangkok bar girl takes out one of her customers’ eyes with her stiletto heel. Most gruesome of all, a high-society model and actress undergoes an interrupted abortion, leading to a nightmarish tale of abandoned foetuses, a bird-eating spider and prayers to arcane medieval spirits.

Some of the stories are inspired by true-life crimes that still resonate today. Algie’s account of an immigrant rickshaw driver from Hainan turned notorious serial killer, who cannibalised his victims in 1950s Bangkok, doesn’t pull any punches.

Yet for all the surface shock, and occasionally clumsy prose, Algie is attempting something more sophisticated. His stories read almost as fictionalised journalism, as if mere reportage cannot convey the multiple layers of Thai society that are mostly shrouded from outside eyes, or adequately reveal the true nature of the lives of the foreign chancers, and worse, who are drawn to Thailand.

Author of Phantom Lover and On the Night Joey Ramone Died

Author of the Phantom Lover and On the Night Joey Ramone Died

Algie makes this explicit in Tsunami, the concluding story, which feeds off his own experiences working as a journalist and then a volunteer on a Thai island hit by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. He takes some bitter swipes at the short attention span of today’s media, and the agenda of official aid agencies.

Tsunami brings together the most memorable characters from some of the preceding pieces – the Bangkok hooker who attempts to keep her unsavoury world at bay with her Buddhist beliefs, two burned-out journalists, the one-time snake handler – and weaves their fates together in a mostly effective and satisfactory fashion. Like the best of the writing in the collection, it’s lifted by the fact that Algie knows Thailand intimately, and is both stern and sympathetic with his damaged characters.

At times, the book feels like a lament for the Thailand Algie moved to in 1992, which is now long gone. He manages to be both clear-eyed and nostalgic in his descriptions of the unchecked boom town Bangkok was before the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

But The Phantom Lover is above all a horror show. Fans of the genre will be satisfied, while for everyone else the stories offer an authentic, illuminating and often unsettling ride through Thailand’s underbelly.

Read the review on the newspaper’s website here. The Phantom Lover is available as a paperback or ebook Amazon.

The front cover blurb for the Phantom Lover was written by Bangkok 8 author John Burdett: “Many people write about Thailand these days, but very few have the depth and breadth of Jim Algie. With the persistence of a seasoned journalist and the skill of a born story-teller he takes us places and reveals truths that lesser authors cannot begin to match.”

Jim Algie has written about punk history, his own experiences as a musician, and the life of a falling rock star trying to stage a comeback in the book On the Night Joey Ramone Died: Tales of rock and punk from Bangkok, New York, Cambodia and Norway,available from Amazon as an ebook for US$2.99, and now in an expanded paperback edition that includes a 130-page nonfiction bonus section of “Rock Writings and Musical Memoirs,” including autobiographical pieces like “My Close Encounters with Rock Stars” (Joe Strummer, the Pixies, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Ice-T and Leonard Cohen, as well as “My Last Show and Worst Onstage Disaster” that chronicles the musician-turned-author’s near-death experience at a gig in Berlin. The paperback is available only from Amazon for US$12.99.      

New book cover from Phantom Lover author

First paperback edition of “On the Night Joey Ramone Died,” released in February 2018, including a new front cover blurb from the renowned author, former singer and hit songwriter, Timothy Hallinan: “The funniest sad book and the saddest funny book I’ve read in a long time. The book also captures the pop music world as well as, and in some cases better than, most rock autobiographies.”