400 pp. October 6, 2026, Angry Robot. SFF.
Mostly new-ish to Manickavel, I didn’t know exactly what to expect from this novel. I had, however, read her super weird story, “The Lucy Temerlin Institute for Broken Shapeshifters Resident #11: ChestPain Sumitra” (Manickavel has amazing titles!). It’s in Bandigoat: A Collection of Strange and Horrible Tales, edited by Rakesh Khanna. The weather around this Institute is weird: Groups of cyclones settle on the roof. Stuff is weird inside too: ChestPain Sumitra, a resident, has murder hornets coming out of her palm. The hornets become something of a bother, and so ChestPain Sumitra is put into a seclusion pod. It’s a great little story.
Which mostly prepared me, actually, for the bunch of delicious weirdness that’s A Compendium of Supernatural Entities Found in the Government Girls Higher Secondary School. The Compendium is a book that appears one day in Thamarai’s school bag. She can’t seem to get rid of it (“she kept putting the notebook on the floor against the wall, and it kept reappearing in her bag when she wasn’t looking”), and no one else can see what she sees in it; it looks like an ordinary botany book to them, and her friends are annoyed by how she spends her days with her nose buried in it. But the Compendium is actually what it says in the title, and entries from it are interspersed throughout the novel (although it took me a while to realise this was what that was).
Thamarai is exposed to strange things before she meets any entities and well before she finally reads the Compendium:
“[Strange] things began to happen to her. Sometimes it was just unlucky strangeness: a pig would get its head stuck in the spokes of her cycle or a family of ravens would consecutively poop on her head. Other events were inexplicable: a crowd of children who all had hands where their heads should have been had once chased her while she cycled to school. Another time, while fishing in her bag for her pen, she had repeatedly pulled out handfuls of old teeth which tried to bury themselves into her palm like they were shy.”
(A bit reminiscent of the murder hornets, those teeth.)
She also gets stuck in a wall for a whole afternoon.
I confess to having been a bit nervous of the body horror aspects of Manickavel’s writing—because there’s quite a bit of that, and a large amount of ick—but honestly, her humorous style kept me reading, and she manages to make it all really delightful. The town Thamarai has moved to, where the haunted school is, “attracts con men, gangsters, smugglers, the silently pious, saints on bicycles, refugees, holy women, and scientists.” She now lives with her aunt, whose eyes she’s “never actually seen … and if she thought about this too much, it scared her.” Thamarai is unhappy, and some of it is “normal” teenage angst, but it feels like there’s more going on. She doesn’t fit in: maybe the strange things happen to her because she’s strange. She’s terrible at school (except for a brief and mysterious period). She’s a teenage girl antihero, and I’m a huge fan. The body horror and ick serve a purpose then: they convey pain, and there’s a deep undercurrent running through the novel, that peaks, in my opinion, when Thamarai has a confrontation with a predator teacher.
A Compendium of Supernatural Entities Found in the Government Girls Higher Secondary School is about girls and high school, and all of that is written so well. It deals with things like educational standards (what the government provides at GGHSS isn’t really enough), a little with caste and economic class, expectations placed on girls, and predatory behaviour by men. The supernatural entities are often but not always funny and silly; some are genuinely terrifying and deadly, and her school is full of them (and one is at a house she frequents). They include the stuff on the school’s phantom first floor, Amul babies, sand worms, the paati, and many more.
I did rather hope for a happy ending, although nothing at all suggested there would be one. The actual ending is as ambiguous as anything else in the book, like the fate of the predator, what happens to the book and Thamarai’s additions to it, and various other plot points. This is fine, though, and fits in with all the rest of the weirdness. We’re privy to a strange slice of culture and social life, and then we’re not any longer, and we move on.
Thank you to Angry Robot and to NetGalley for the e-ARC.
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Find out more about A Compendium of Supernatural Entities Found in the Government Girls Higher Secondary School from Angry Robot here or Blaft here.
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