The Weight of Our Sky and Queen of the Tiles author Hanna Alkaf crafts a dark love letter to her mission school days in YA supernatural thriller The Hysterical Girls of St. Bernadette’s. When students at St. Bernadette’s, a 112-year-old all-girls school in Kuala Lumpur, begin letting out terrified, unrelenting screams and are unable to stop, officials blame ghosts and mass hysteria. After 16-year-old Khadija’s younger sister is beset by the scream—and as those affected begin disappearing—Khadija and her friends endeavor to solve the mystery behind the chaos. Soon, the girls learn the truth about their beloved institution and the real-life monsters that inhabit it. In a conversation with PW, Alkaf spoke about her years attending a convent school, and how her education and Malay upbringing factored into her first YA horror novel.
In your acknowledgments, you write “it is rare that you will meet a Malaysian who doesn’t have their own ghost story.” Can you elaborate on that?
In Malaysia, as in many parts of Southeast Asia, and even Asia in general, the boundary between the supernatural world and the natural world is very thin. Our ghosts are part of our culture. We grow up with a very intimate relationship with our ghosts—every Malaysian person you know has probably had a brush with what we consider to be the supernatural at some point in our lives. Even though we might not outright believe in ghosts and the supernatural, I think you’d be hard pressed to find a Malaysian who doesn’t also adhere to the superstitions, just in case. Just because you don’t believe in them doesn’t mean they don’t believe in you.
How did your own education play into the development of The Hysterical Girls of St. Bernadette’s?
I went to a convent school in Kuala Lumpur from the age of seven all the way to 17. It was a very old, historic building; the school celebrated its centenary while I was there, so it’s been around for over 100 years now. There was an unexplained well in the center of the school that they had to put wire mesh over to make sure that no curious kids fell in. Sometimes there were electrical issues, which meant flickering lights. There were literally bats in the dark corners. You had to avoid stepping on bat poop all the time. It really played into the whole “there are ghosts in this building” kind of thing. It was made for telling ghost stories. It’s always been in the back of my mind that I wanted to write a scary school story.
There’s also a very specific kind of sisterhood and camaraderie that comes from being in an all-girls school that is hard to define. Even if you don’t necessarily like each other, it’s a bit like family. They’re part of you. You are allowed to dislike each other and fight with each other, but nobody else is allowed to do that. That’s the mood that was pervasive at the time. There’s a very specific vibe that comes from having gone through that experience together that I really wanted to bring out in The Hysterical Girls of St. Bernadette’s because it’s one of the things that I remember most from my school days. I think if you’ve gone through the same kind of experience, you can immediately recognize it as you’re reading.
Female friendship, finding one’s autonomy, and recovering from trauma are integral themes throughout the novel. What informed these subjects?
The biggest influence was that I was really angry at the state of the world. The idea for St. Bernadette’s came about at a time when there were a lot of stories and articles coming out about the truly heinous crimes that are done to young girls in particular, not that this is different at any other point. How much belief people afford a young girl is conditional, and in that way, support is also conditional. It depends on a lot of things. It depends on how they behave, how they react, how they describe what happened, what they did in the moment, what they were wearing. So much of it is conditional and transactional, and it made me angry. And that anger was woven into the story.
How did you use this idea of support being conditional to develop the main characters’ alternating POVs?
The Hysterical Girls of St. Bernadette’s was my first attempt at a young adult dual first-person POV, which was a headache in itself because obviously you need to make sure those voices are distinct and separate. As I was writing, I was thinking a lot about the experience of how you have to present yourself to barter for belief. You have to earn it by performing a certain type of victimhood, and if you don’t perform in the way that people like, then that belief isn’t yours, that support isn’t yours, you don’t manage to earn it. I wanted to come at that from the viewpoint of two very different girls, equally pressured in their own ways, going through two very different experiences that are relatable to a lot of girls out there. Both narratives come together through this idea of, “What does it mean to be an ideal victim? Who gets to be believed? Who do we support and why?”
What are you working on next?
I have an illustrated middle grade anthology coming out from Abrams next year that I edited. It’s a collection of short stories based on Southeast Asian cryptids written by a whole bunch of Southeast Asian and diaspora authors like Erin Entrada Kelly and Greg van Eekhout and Jesse Sutanto. It is a dream project of mine, because I’m always looking for ways to bring more Southeast Asian and more Malaysian authors into the spotlight, and after five years of publishing and working on books, I finally find myself in a position where I can do that, where I can pitch these things and make them a reality. So that’s pretty cool.
The Hysterical Girls of St. Bernadette’s by Hanna Alkaf. Salaam Reads, $19.99 Sept. 24 ISBN 978-1-5344-9458-9
