From issue #1, Elka Ray Nguyen provides a behind-the-scenes look of her story “The Yellow River”:

While I’ve always loved to read—and write—mysteries, I was never attracted to stories about the supernatural. In fact, I thought “speculative fiction” meant “edgy”.

A few years ago I found a musty, dog-eared copy of Lost Girls in my local gym in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The debut novel of a Canadian writer named Andrew Pyper, Lost Girls came out in 2000 and won that year’s Arthur Ellis Award, the top prize for mystery and crime writing in Canada. If I’d known it was a ghost story I wouldn’t have read it. But once I started, I was hooked. Although I’ve lived in Asia for 20 years, I grew up in Canada. Maybe it was the small-town Canadian setting that reeled me in, or just Pyper’s haunting but wildly beautiful writing. While the ending was unsatisfying, I hardly cared. I can still feel that book, so mysterious and disturbing.

Since then I’ve written two short stories that classify as “speculative”. One, “The Yellow River”, is included in this inaugural edition of LONTAR. The other, “You Get What You Pay For”, will appear in Monsoon’s upcoming anthology Crime Scene Asia: Asia’s Best Crime Fiction. Much to my surprise, a Catholic miracle and a vengeful ghost have crept into my novel-in-progress, which recounts the 1930’s murder of a French priest in Vietnam’s Central Highlands. What’s next? I can’t even speculate.