144 pp. October 28, 2025, Blaft Publications. SFF/folk horror.
This review first appeared in The Sunday Long Read, February 1, 2026.
Sometimes what you need to take your mind off real-world horror is fictional horror from another part of the world—like Bandigoat, the (deliberate) mispronunciation of Bandicoot that collects stories from seven Indian authors. Monsters include: a woman who may be a demon that’s a protector of workers (we hear about her at her funeral); a whole institute’s worth of broken shape-shifters; Muloon Mung, another shape-shifter who eats people; a VERY strange dog (in my favourite story, Miriam Kumaradoss-Hohauser’s “Cur”)—or perhaps it’s the woman interacting with it that’s strange; a boy made of ice cream who appears when there’s unseasonal snow (barely a monster, to be honest, being made of ice-cream); and a Boochandi (bogeyman) that makes a deal with a grave-digger (in another excellent story, “The Legend of Rani Grace” by Rashmi Ruth Devadasan).
Perhaps it’s not quite correct to call these tales horror, since I read and loved them and I really don’t do horror. These are imaginative tales of the weird and wonderful and decidedly strange world lurking at the edges of what we see. Since what we see is currently quite horrible, it seems smart to look away for a bit to what lurks, I think. Bandigoat is a terrific way to do so.
Thank you to Rakesh for the review copy!
You can get Bandigoat from Blaft here in print or here as an ebook.
Harare Review of Books 
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