The Midnight Children: A Vanishing

Description

What do you do when strange things happen around you? The Midnight Children trilogy is a series of dark fantasy novels for children age 8-13 combining Asian mythology and Gothic elements. The characters, ten-year-old Min and twelve-year-old Zak are the main protagonists. In The Midnight Children- A Vanishing, Zak and Min's father mysteriously disappears at breakfast and curious things then begin to happen to them. Min encounters two small creatures with spider-like legs, a doll that runs, talks and steals and Shaz, the shaman, who gives her a box with a finger bone inside. Zak is chased by a strange man on all fours in the shopping mall, flees from snakes that interrupt his homework and is visited by a ghostly old lady in his bedroom who happens to love matcha ice cream. Trying to find their father, they are transported to an eerie world called the Moonlight Lands where oily creatures want to kidnap and eat them. The novel concludes with Zak vanishing one night during dinner.

Tunku Halim was born in 1964. He is dubbed as Asia's Stephen King and by delving into Malay myth, legends and folklore, his writing is often regarded as 'World Gothic'. His novel, Dark Demon Rising (1997), was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award whilst his second novel, Vermillion Eye (2000), is used as a study text in The National University of Singapore's Language and Literature course. He has also won first prize in a Fellowship of Australian Writers' short story competition and has had three consecutive wins in Malaysia's Popular-Star Readers' Choice Awards between 2015 and 2017. His short-story collections include-The Rape of Martha Teoh & Other Chilling Stories (1997), BloodHaze- 15 Chilling Tales (1999), The Woman Who Grew Horns and Other Works (2001), 7 Days to Midnight (2013) and The Rape of Nancy Ng - 13 Nightmares (2018). His other novels include Juriah's Song (2008), Last Breath (2014) and A Malaysian Restaurant in London (2015). His non-fiction books include A Children's History of Malaysia (2003), History of Malaysia-A Children's Encyclopedia (2009) and a biography of his late father, A Prince Called "Charlie" (2018). Tunku Halim's collection of short horror stories, published by Penguin Random House SEA in 2019, Scream to the Shadows, was a best seller in Singapore and Malaysia.