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misspalah's review against another edition
3.0
“Finally, yellow is associated with decay and sickness. And while no stories feature a character with jaundice or decomposing corpses, many do highlight the sickness that
can infest a society which erects walls and barriers between the artificially formed insular groups that comprise the whole of Malaysia. 1 + 1 + 1 + recognized other + unacknowledged other does not equal 1Malaysia. And it shows in this book. But the good news is that everyone shares this collective sickness equally, allowing for yet another means to bridge the widening gap between groups”.
- Intro By Kris Williamson (KL Noir : Yellow)
.
.
I have read KL Noir : Red and KL Noir : White 7 years ago. I can’t remember much about both books but at that time i was so looking forward to read an english book that has been localised to fix the taste of young Millennials and Gen Z. Most of the stories generally were like cross breeds of Black Mirror, Westworld, I spit on your grave and X-files but in a Malaysian Flavor. Now, In 2022, i would like to continue finishing the KL Noir Series but i couldn’t find KL Noir : Blue. I decided to just read Yellow first despite it being the final volume of KL Noir. Here’s my individual rating for each story. I only summarised the one that i rated high. :
1. Trap by Choong Jay Vee (2/5)
2. Never Forget A face by Chin Ai May (3/5)
3. The Disgraced by Foo Sek Han (3/5)
4. French Fries for Aunty Kamalam by Sharmilla Ganesan (4/5) - That French fries must be so damn good that Aunty Kamalam decided to take life for it.
5. The Kill Wish by Catalina Rembuyan (4/5) - Change and retract your statement or else, there will be a target on your back. I have been instructed to kill you.
6. Contrail by Leroy Luar (2/5)
7. Deathwritten by Abd Qayyum Jumadi (4/5) - Trust no one because you never know one day, who will betray you at the end.
8. Anai by Wong Pek Mei (3/5)
9. The Ride by Paul Gnanaselvam (4/5) - A loner and his quest to get a decent conversation.
10. Ambrosia by Timothy Nakayama (3/5)
11. The Case of Botak Chin, The robin hood of sentul by Martin Vengadesan (2/5)
12. The Lost pilgrim by Sukhbir Cheema (3/5)
13. Happy Family by Claudia Skyler Foong (4/5) - What constituted A happy family when the union began to demand blood?
14. Breaking Point by Zufar Ismail Zeid (5/5) - When a notable serial killer started to hunt racists in Malaysia, Police were left speechless. Should every Malaysian be killed since everyone is racist at some point?
15. Girl Power by Subashini Navaratnam (5/5) - Girl decided that she had enough of this patriarchal bullshit and decided to take revenge. She believes that Goddess Kali is with her and guiding her life.
16. Victims of Society by Natasha Gideon (4/5) - The last story made went ‘what the actual fuck’ especially with the ending. I was traumatised by it. The main character might see himself as a victim of the society but i don’t think any readers will.
I think the beginning of this volume is a bit slow. I did not enjoy the first 3 stories but then the fourth story pulled me back in and i finished this book in one sitting. Towards the end of the book where all the stories remain excellent and i was left wanting more from it. Overall, A solid collection. Even the stories that i dont like, it was not badly written, its just not for me. I am sure that some readers might find stories that i rated 2 or 3 stars more enjoyable than the one i rated 4 or 5. Now its time to find KL Noir : Blue.
.
can infest a society which erects walls and barriers between the artificially formed insular groups that comprise the whole of Malaysia. 1 + 1 + 1 + recognized other + unacknowledged other does not equal 1Malaysia. And it shows in this book. But the good news is that everyone shares this collective sickness equally, allowing for yet another means to bridge the widening gap between groups”.
- Intro By Kris Williamson (KL Noir : Yellow)
.
.
I have read KL Noir : Red and KL Noir : White 7 years ago. I can’t remember much about both books but at that time i was so looking forward to read an english book that has been localised to fix the taste of young Millennials and Gen Z. Most of the stories generally were like cross breeds of Black Mirror, Westworld, I spit on your grave and X-files but in a Malaysian Flavor. Now, In 2022, i would like to continue finishing the KL Noir Series but i couldn’t find KL Noir : Blue. I decided to just read Yellow first despite it being the final volume of KL Noir. Here’s my individual rating for each story. I only summarised the one that i rated high. :
1. Trap by Choong Jay Vee (2/5)
2. Never Forget A face by Chin Ai May (3/5)
3. The Disgraced by Foo Sek Han (3/5)
4. French Fries for Aunty Kamalam by Sharmilla Ganesan (4/5) - That French fries must be so damn good that Aunty Kamalam decided to take life for it.
5. The Kill Wish by Catalina Rembuyan (4/5) - Change and retract your statement or else, there will be a target on your back. I have been instructed to kill you.
6. Contrail by Leroy Luar (2/5)
7. Deathwritten by Abd Qayyum Jumadi (4/5) - Trust no one because you never know one day, who will betray you at the end.
8. Anai by Wong Pek Mei (3/5)
9. The Ride by Paul Gnanaselvam (4/5) - A loner and his quest to get a decent conversation.
10. Ambrosia by Timothy Nakayama (3/5)
11. The Case of Botak Chin, The robin hood of sentul by Martin Vengadesan (2/5)
12. The Lost pilgrim by Sukhbir Cheema (3/5)
13. Happy Family by Claudia Skyler Foong (4/5) - What constituted A happy family when the union began to demand blood?
14. Breaking Point by Zufar Ismail Zeid (5/5) - When a notable serial killer started to hunt racists in Malaysia, Police were left speechless. Should every Malaysian be killed since everyone is racist at some point?
15. Girl Power by Subashini Navaratnam (5/5) - Girl decided that she had enough of this patriarchal bullshit and decided to take revenge. She believes that Goddess Kali is with her and guiding her life.
16. Victims of Society by Natasha Gideon (4/5) - The last story made went ‘what the actual fuck’ especially with the ending. I was traumatised by it. The main character might see himself as a victim of the society but i don’t think any readers will.
I think the beginning of this volume is a bit slow. I did not enjoy the first 3 stories but then the fourth story pulled me back in and i finished this book in one sitting. Towards the end of the book where all the stories remain excellent and i was left wanting more from it. Overall, A solid collection. Even the stories that i dont like, it was not badly written, its just not for me. I am sure that some readers might find stories that i rated 2 or 3 stars more enjoyable than the one i rated 4 or 5. Now its time to find KL Noir : Blue.
.
sharonbakar's review against another edition
4.0
Fixi’s popular KL Noir series is completed this month with the release of this fourth and final volume. In Yellow, we are promised stories that are “sick and twisted”, and a journey through “the dark underbelly of Kuala Lumpur”. And this is pretty much what we get.
The nature of the genre means that we know that things are always going to end badly, but we are grateful to writers and who take the trouble to create convincing characters and believable scenarios along the way. The best stories in the collection also show us the city we think we know in a new light, and reflect the cultural zeitgeist.
When seemingly ordinary folk turn to violent crime in fiction, it takes skill on the part of the writer to make the transformation convincing. Two stories in particular manage this challenge very well.
Selvi in Subashini Navaratanam’s Girl Power feels rage and frustration at the lot of women in traditional Tamil society, and fights against social restriction. She comes to increasingly identify with the dark goddess Kali after accidentally glimpsing her statue during a temple visit as a child. This is an intelligent and heartfelt piece with a strong narrative voice and the journey into obsession is entirely credible. In Sharmilla Ganesan’s French Fries for Aunty Kamalan, a devout Hindu discovers from a website that her favourite French fries from a fast-food restaurant chain are actually fried with beef-fat to make them more delicious. This is of course completely against the tenets of her faith. We really feel for Kamalan as she is torn between desire for the forbidden food, haunted by the jingles and the TV ads, and her self-disgust. The story also nicely parallels the spate of scare stories about products on the market containing “porcine” DNA.
Several of the stories play with the idea of the duality of man, with good and evil coexisting within an individual. Zufar Ismail’s cop on the trail of a serial killer in Breaking Point by makes a terrifying discovery about himself, and the voice of the wearied cop is particularly convincing. Catalina Rebuyan’s The Kill Wish is an almost metaphysical tale of a hired assassin who comes across a victim who is so completely good that he must rethink his mission.
Appearances, as we learn, are deceptive. An old man suffering from dementia in a care home must be harmless, right? But when in Chin Ai-May’s Never Forget a Face, a retired cop thinks he recognises an old adversary among the other inmates, his instinct for self-preservation takes over. And the contrast between innocence and evil is nowhere stronger than in Trap by Choong Jay Vee, a chilling tale of a cosplayer attending an anime convention at KLCC dressed as Lolita.
As we might expect in a collection of this nature, there’s plenty of blood and gore. The opening of Sek Han Foo’s The Disgraced is stomach-churningly violent, while Happy Family by Claudia Skyler Foong ends up with almost as many corpses as a Shakespearian tragedy. But there are more understated pieces too, the most powerful of which is Paul Gnanaselvam’s The Ride. A poor boy from one of the roughest neighbourhoods feels a need to keep up appearances in front of his wealthier classmates, and is overjoyed when one offers him a daily lift in his chauffeured car. There’s real horror in the implied ending, which is surely drawn from newspaper accounts of unexplained deaths in the lift shafts of the notorious San Peng flats. Sukhbir Cheema’s story The Lost Pilgrim also uses setting very well and gets across the difficulty of creating any sense of connection in the city.
The one piece of reportage in the book is an account by Martin Vengadesan of the rise of the legendary gang-leader Botak Chin in the 1970’s. Nicknamed “the Robin Hood of Sentul”, Chin was both charismatic and wily, and his sharing of the spoils with the wider community ensured his survival for a long time. It’s a shame that the piece feels a lot flatter than the fictional efforts that surround it.
However, while there is much good writing in the book, there are still plenty of rough edges. There are the problems with the nuts and bolts of short story construction which seem to dog most local collections; stories start too slowly and not far enough in, scene transitions are not smooth in places, and back story often seems dropped in whereas clues should have been planted much earlier.
Sometimes the flaws co-exist with the strengths. Timothy Nakayama’s Ambrosia takes us into the sharply realised world of the celebrity chef, but the darker elements in the story just don’t convince. Similarly, in Contrail Leroy Luar creates an atmospheric setting for his story of urban exploration set in the old budget terminal, but the encounter with the protagonist’s ex-girlfriend and the back story about their relationship is clumsily drawn.
Overall though, this is a very enjoyable collection, and the sheer inventiveness of the writers ensure that the tales never feel derivative or predictable.
The nature of the genre means that we know that things are always going to end badly, but we are grateful to writers and who take the trouble to create convincing characters and believable scenarios along the way. The best stories in the collection also show us the city we think we know in a new light, and reflect the cultural zeitgeist.
When seemingly ordinary folk turn to violent crime in fiction, it takes skill on the part of the writer to make the transformation convincing. Two stories in particular manage this challenge very well.
Selvi in Subashini Navaratanam’s Girl Power feels rage and frustration at the lot of women in traditional Tamil society, and fights against social restriction. She comes to increasingly identify with the dark goddess Kali after accidentally glimpsing her statue during a temple visit as a child. This is an intelligent and heartfelt piece with a strong narrative voice and the journey into obsession is entirely credible. In Sharmilla Ganesan’s French Fries for Aunty Kamalan, a devout Hindu discovers from a website that her favourite French fries from a fast-food restaurant chain are actually fried with beef-fat to make them more delicious. This is of course completely against the tenets of her faith. We really feel for Kamalan as she is torn between desire for the forbidden food, haunted by the jingles and the TV ads, and her self-disgust. The story also nicely parallels the spate of scare stories about products on the market containing “porcine” DNA.
Several of the stories play with the idea of the duality of man, with good and evil coexisting within an individual. Zufar Ismail’s cop on the trail of a serial killer in Breaking Point by makes a terrifying discovery about himself, and the voice of the wearied cop is particularly convincing. Catalina Rebuyan’s The Kill Wish is an almost metaphysical tale of a hired assassin who comes across a victim who is so completely good that he must rethink his mission.
Appearances, as we learn, are deceptive. An old man suffering from dementia in a care home must be harmless, right? But when in Chin Ai-May’s Never Forget a Face, a retired cop thinks he recognises an old adversary among the other inmates, his instinct for self-preservation takes over. And the contrast between innocence and evil is nowhere stronger than in Trap by Choong Jay Vee, a chilling tale of a cosplayer attending an anime convention at KLCC dressed as Lolita.
As we might expect in a collection of this nature, there’s plenty of blood and gore. The opening of Sek Han Foo’s The Disgraced is stomach-churningly violent, while Happy Family by Claudia Skyler Foong ends up with almost as many corpses as a Shakespearian tragedy. But there are more understated pieces too, the most powerful of which is Paul Gnanaselvam’s The Ride. A poor boy from one of the roughest neighbourhoods feels a need to keep up appearances in front of his wealthier classmates, and is overjoyed when one offers him a daily lift in his chauffeured car. There’s real horror in the implied ending, which is surely drawn from newspaper accounts of unexplained deaths in the lift shafts of the notorious San Peng flats. Sukhbir Cheema’s story The Lost Pilgrim also uses setting very well and gets across the difficulty of creating any sense of connection in the city.
The one piece of reportage in the book is an account by Martin Vengadesan of the rise of the legendary gang-leader Botak Chin in the 1970’s. Nicknamed “the Robin Hood of Sentul”, Chin was both charismatic and wily, and his sharing of the spoils with the wider community ensured his survival for a long time. It’s a shame that the piece feels a lot flatter than the fictional efforts that surround it.
However, while there is much good writing in the book, there are still plenty of rough edges. There are the problems with the nuts and bolts of short story construction which seem to dog most local collections; stories start too slowly and not far enough in, scene transitions are not smooth in places, and back story often seems dropped in whereas clues should have been planted much earlier.
Sometimes the flaws co-exist with the strengths. Timothy Nakayama’s Ambrosia takes us into the sharply realised world of the celebrity chef, but the darker elements in the story just don’t convince. Similarly, in Contrail Leroy Luar creates an atmospheric setting for his story of urban exploration set in the old budget terminal, but the encounter with the protagonist’s ex-girlfriend and the back story about their relationship is clumsily drawn.
Overall though, this is a very enjoyable collection, and the sheer inventiveness of the writers ensure that the tales never feel derivative or predictable.
qomareads's review against another edition
4.0
To the bitter end. Yellow can stand together side by side with Red. I swear this was as good as the first volume. Wanna cry loads this going to be the last volume of the series.
Few favourites.
FRENCH FRIES FOR AUNTY KAMALAM - Sharmila Ganesan
ANAI - Wong Pek Mei
THE RIDE - Paul GnanaSelvam
HAPPY FAMILY - Claudia Skyler Foong
VICTIMS OF SOCIETY - Natasha Gideon
Few favourites.
FRENCH FRIES FOR AUNTY KAMALAM - Sharmila Ganesan
ANAI - Wong Pek Mei
THE RIDE - Paul GnanaSelvam
HAPPY FAMILY - Claudia Skyler Foong
VICTIMS OF SOCIETY - Natasha Gideon
mobyskine's review
3.0
Saya suka cerita Anai walaupun ia sangat disturbing with sick human being still, it was a great story. Deathwritten as well.
Love the book somehow.
Love the book somehow.
qomareads's review
4.0
To the bitter end. Yellow can stand together side by side with Red. I swear this was as good as the first volume. Wanna cry loads this going to be the last volume of the series.
Few favourites.
FRENCH FRIES FOR AUNTY KAMALAM - Sharmila Ganesan
ANAI - Wong Pek Mei
THE RIDE - Paul GnanaSelvam
HAPPY FAMILY - Claudia Skyler Foong
VICTIMS OF SOCIETY - Natasha Gideon
Few favourites.
FRENCH FRIES FOR AUNTY KAMALAM - Sharmila Ganesan
ANAI - Wong Pek Mei
THE RIDE - Paul GnanaSelvam
HAPPY FAMILY - Claudia Skyler Foong
VICTIMS OF SOCIETY - Natasha Gideon
frhwrdn's review
4.0
I read this book after I've finished my SPM Trials, I need a getaway, something new to read and glad that I found it.
I liked how the final and last book of the series, had darker themes. Crime can be done by almost everyone, not solely a man, a children too, has a potential to become a killer. This book is a physical proof of it.
Just when you thought the first essay is bad enough, the next one will probably caught you off guard. i started thinking ¨Maybe the world is bad after all.¨
One of the short stories, in my opinion, makes no sense at all, but okay, we all make mistakes, after all.
I liked how the final and last book of the series, had darker themes. Crime can be done by almost everyone, not solely a man, a children too, has a potential to become a killer. This book is a physical proof of it.
Just when you thought the first essay is bad enough, the next one will probably caught you off guard. i started thinking ¨Maybe the world is bad after all.¨
One of the short stories, in my opinion, makes no sense at all, but okay, we all make mistakes, after all.
chiahui's review
3.0
Finished the whole Noir series and I'd have to say that the first and last (red and yellow) are my favourites.
lthe7th's review
4.0
I have no idea that this is the last book of the KL Noir collection. All I know was that this seems to be the most iconic and it has two writers I know so I was curious at what they will come up with. It was also going for cheap as the Popular bookstore at IPC was having a clearance sale.
Man, I obviously did not feel good reading any of these stories. But that's to be expected as I was reading twisted and sick tales. In nearly every story, someone dies. Some shocked me more than others. And some were definitely better written. I think the most memorable one would be French Fries for Aunty Kamalan which is also referred to by the cover.
But the ones that really stuck with me and make me think about how twisted we are as humans are Anai and Happy Family. Anai because it was something that is so prevalent in Malaysian society but it was never fictionalised in that context until now. Though that could be because I haven't come across any. I don't know why but I just thought it was really brave of the author to tackle this topic as it's too painful for me to even imagine it. Happy Family reminds me of the card game for some reason but it has nothing to do with it. I was just so shocked by how it turned out.
The other stories were just as twisted but these two are the ones that I recall every time I look at this book. Besides french fries.
Man, I obviously did not feel good reading any of these stories. But that's to be expected as I was reading twisted and sick tales. In nearly every story, someone dies. Some shocked me more than others. And some were definitely better written. I think the most memorable one would be French Fries for Aunty Kamalan which is also referred to by the cover.
But the ones that really stuck with me and make me think about how twisted we are as humans are Anai and Happy Family. Anai because it was something that is so prevalent in Malaysian society but it was never fictionalised in that context until now. Though that could be because I haven't come across any. I don't know why but I just thought it was really brave of the author to tackle this topic as it's too painful for me to even imagine it. Happy Family reminds me of the card game for some reason but it has nothing to do with it. I was just so shocked by how it turned out.
The other stories were just as twisted but these two are the ones that I recall every time I look at this book. Besides french fries.
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