Inspired by Ray, 3 friends reunite to pen horror novel

KOLKATA: Inspired by Satyajit Ray’s narration style, three childhood friends from Kolkata, working in different states in the corporate sector, came back to the city during the Covid lockdown period in 2019 and conceived ‘The Uncanny’, a graphic horror novel with ‘12 short tales of the unexplained’.

Speaking to Millennium Post, the three friends Diptarag Bhattacharjee, Indraneel Ganguli and Gautam Lahiri, recalled how the curiosity for the unseen led them to publish ‘The Uncanny’ under the tag ‘DIG Tales’.

Diptarag highlighted that he found the inspiration for the book from his real-life experiences during his early days as a “travelling salesman”.

Apart from the Ray-inspired artwork by Indraneel Ganguli, who is also an advertising professional, the book has 12 short stories whose titles also draw inspiration from Ray’s books for children. Some of the titles are — ‘The Murshidabad Mystery’, ‘Shiver in Shibpur’, ‘The Mariam Mystery’. For those that love reading horror novels with bated breath, there is the story ‘Shaken and Stirred’. One could recall such alliterations in books of Ray such as ‘Ghurghutiar Ghotona’.

Ray had made a mark in this genre with his ‘situational horror’ tales. Some of them were ‘Khagam’, ‘Mriganka Babur Ghotona’ and even a horror story relating to an Indigo plant estate ‘Neel Atanka’. ‘The Uncanny’ also presents its readers with a similar tale in ‘The Murshidabad Mystery’ — a story narrated to Diptangshu by his childhood friend. The narrative is in first person, based on incidents and experiences during one of her family marriages at Murshidabad. It recalls some true and eerie aspects dating back to an Indigo plantation.

For the shy imbibers of spirits, if the term ‘Dutch Courage’ until now meant that burst of confidence after a few glasses of the amber restorative, then the story with the same phrase in this book is a must-read. It recalls an incident in the summer of 1978 at a house at Chinsurah, Hooghly.Gautam Lahiri, an IT professional and a travel enthusiast recalls a chilling incident at the Corbett National Park in Uttarakhand. He recalls that evening when he was supposed to reach a nearby forest station without a guide. He said he was a stone’s throw away from a bush from where he could hear a repressed sound of a growl. He did not stop but later learnt that a leopard had mauled a local girl there.