A Perfect Wife: the vicious horror zine bringing people together
The story of a global collaboration, a fundraiser, and an unlikely art show.
Zedeck Siew, the writer of Lorn Song for the Bachelor and various other well-loved fantasy adventures, published A Perfect Wife on his tumblr blog in October 2024. The creature at the center of the adventure is a pontianak: a Malaysian vampire, always a woman, usually born out of trauma. The text begins with the word “disappearances”. Refugees are disappearing, being killed—but it’s not clear if it’s the pontianak doing it. After all, refugees are always getting killed. There are all kinds of monsters.
A Perfect Wife is explicitly a work of horror, even read through Siew’s spare, matter-of-fact prose. “The pontianak is a predator: she eats men,” he writes. She visits “the most cishet male person” in the party and tries to draw them into a dark alley. The lyricism is present but restrained. It reads like an uncle warning you before you step out for the evening. Or a local newspaper article. After all, what is the news but horror, domesticated? In a similar way, the pontianak can be domesticated—transformed from cannibalistic spirit to demure woman, through the judicious application of an iron nail to the head.
This sober quality extends to the form of the work itself. It’s a whole adventure casually posted to tumblr, accompanied with Siew’s own pen-and-ink illustrations and some black-and-white photographs of Kuala Lumpur. Or at least that was the case previously.
