The Other Side by Faraaz Kazi - A Book Review

Tales of the paranormal are, almost invariably, associated with the horror genre. In other words, the reader expects to feel the delicious shuddery feeling of vicarious fear when he reads paranormal stories. This assumption, though, need not be entirely correct. Anne Rice's vampire tales, for example, are more literary fiction than horror fiction. The Twilight saga veers off into romance. It is, therefore, not entirely necessary for a paranormal tale to also be a horror story in order for it to be a good read.

"The Other Side" by Faraaz Kazi and Vivek Banerjee is a collection of thirteen paranormal stories. The blurb and excerpts seek to establish the collection as belonging to the horror genre. To me, though, not all stories are actually horror stories in the collection unless a reader feels that the very existence of the paranormal in the 'real' world is horrifying. That does not, of itself, detract from the reading experience.

In fact, most of the stories in the collection are a pretty decent read. A few of them end with a surprise twist and, in most of such stories, the twist is horrifying as well. In fact, one of the better things about these stories is the fact that the twist seems to arise naturally from the course of the story and does not appear to be an artificial imposition to shock the reader. The English was a pleasant surprise insofar as it pleased the purist in me for the most part. There were a few edit errors but not so many as to mar the book significantly.

I do need to point out a few areas where the book could have been better. One of the stories had a very appealing end and I would have relished the story much better had it not seemed to parallel the descriptions of possession from William Peter Blatty's "Exorcist" too closely. Where the stories were actually intended to be horrifying I found that the authors relied on graphic descriptions of the horrifying phenomenon. I have found that describing the impact on the person being horrified works much better. (As an aside, one story appealed to me mainly because it was centered around a trek to Roopkund - a trek which I attempted early this year only to be stranded by the Uttaranchal debacle)

Minor blemishes apart, the book is actually a pretty decent read. If the reader expects to be mystified more than horrified, he would derive more satisfaction. And, of course, there are quite a few stories which may be mystifyingly horrifying too.

Details of the book can be looked up here

The other side