A Compendium of Supernatural Entities Found in the Government Girls Higher Secondary School

by Kuzhali Manickavel

A boundary-pushing fantasy that blends magical realism with dark academia, perfect for fans of Bunny by Mona Awad and Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth.

In the oppressive heat of a small Tamil Nadu town, strange happenings are common. And the local government secondary school is teeming with supernatural entities.

For Thamarai, an outsider considered strange by her peers, life is dreary and frustrating. She endures nosy neighbours and incomprehensible tuition classes. She despises the way her lecherous English teacher harasses the other girls in her grade. But when Thamarai finds a mysterious notebook full of descriptions of the school's paranormal phenomena, she wonders if it may hold the key to escape...

Genres: Horror, Fantasy, Fiction, Dark Academia, LGBT, India

400 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 6, 2026

About the author

Kuzhali Manickavel (Tamil: குழலி மாணிக்கவேல்) is an Indian writer who writes in English. She was born in Winnipeg, Canada and moved to India when she was thirteen. She currently lives in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu. Her first book - Insects Are Just Like You And Me Except Some Of Them Have Wings was published by Blaft Publications in 2008. Her short stories have also appeared in print magazines like Shimmer Magazine, Versal literary journal, AGNI, PANK, FRiGG and Tehelka.

Reviews

[K.J. Charles]

This was fantastic. Weird dreamy story of a girl failing at school, stifled by the oppressive sexism and utter emptiness of life in Tamil Nadu, very prone to falling in love with her classmates, and constantly seeing supernatural entities. You could probably say "it's all an allegory" but that would be very boring and EngLitty. Largely, it uses the imaginatively bizarre and sometimes weirdly funny entities as a way of commenting on the choking, threatening realities (because as ever, people are the worst thing out there). Marvellously and evocatively written.

This is one of the best books about being a teenage girl I've ever read. Don't go into it expecting a standard urban fantasy/genre type story, is all.

[Christian Z · Rating 3.75 out of 5]

This book was close to a DNF for me. The first 30-40% of the book was slow and somewhat confusing. In addition there were many sentences written in another language that made it seem to go even more slowly. That being said, I'm glad I stuck with it because the second half of the book picked things up.

The story centers around Thamarai, a student at the government girls higher secondary school, who has the curious ability to experience the supernatural that her fellow students don't. She finds what appears to be a dilapidated botany notebook that in reality is a compendium of supernatural entities. Throughout the book, I vacillated between thinking Thamarai simply had severe ADHD combined with an excellent imagination and believing she really was encountering the supernatural entities found at her school.

Much of the book centers around Thamarai and her close companions as they face academic challenges while also having to interact with an English teacher who likes to sexually harass them. Thamarai has the added challenge of being different from her classmates due to her peculiar approach to interaction with others.

This book was enjoyable once the pace quickened but I feel I may have enjoyed it more had I been more familiar with many of the references to East Asian culture.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for an advance reading copy of the book.

[Zana · Rating 4.25 out of 5]

Such a dark and strange book! (Two of my favorite things.) It's like weird girl lit meets contemporary dark fantasy. I'd definitely recommend this if you love those two subgenres.

Once I started reading this novel, I couldn't put it down. I love FMCs who are fellow weird girls and I could definitely feel a kinship with Thamarai. The growing pains of girlhood filled with school cliques, not knowing what to do after graduation, and dealing with monsters felt so relatable. Except that Thamarai can see fantastical creatures and they might or might not be all too friendly.

I think my favorite part was not knowing if Thamarai was actually seeing these monsters (since she's the only one who mentions them) and using them as a form of escapism mixed with a coping mechanism to deal with the very serious and real-life problem of a teacher grooming and sexually harassing and assaulting female students. At its heart, this is a coming-of-age story told through a dark contemporary fantasy lens that asks readers who the monsters truly are.

While this book is pretty dark, there are some comedic interactions between Thamarai and her classmates that had me rolling. The overall tone of this novel blended witty sarcasm with serious commentary, which is my absolute favorite.

Thank you to Angry Robot and NetGalley for this arc.

[n · Rating 5 out of 5]

especially good for a very specific reader who grew up in tamil nadu reading sideways stories from wayside school

[Kate O'Shea]

Way too weird for me.

[Ink · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Compendium of Supernatural Entities Found in the Government Girls Higher Secondary School by Kuzhali Manickavel caught my eye and held my mind.

This book appealed to me because while there is a wonderful emergence of East Asian literature in the West, South Asian authors are not often seen in fiction. As such, I was excited to see one that blended Dark Academia, Horror, Fantasy and better still, folklore. This in itself would push boundaries in the West, and I was excited to see how it would manifest in a South Asian setting

Thamari lives in A Tamil Nadu town, where rumours and strife are common. Alongside the stresses of her community, she cannot connect with her peers in school. Thamari is observant, seeing everything that is going on around her, her feelings and reactions evident, especially at the behaviour of her repulsive English teacher and the way he leches after the girls in her grade. In her government run school, things are supposed to be normal, regulated, but nothing could be further from the truth that Thamari sees. Thamari feels trapped, enduring the heat and strange goings on around her, that is until she finds a notebook containing a log of all of the strange happenings in the school and potentially, a way out of this paranormal nightmare

I absolutely loved this book. The tone is utterly different from say, Chinese fiction while the two have a strong connection through Bodhidharma (the Buddhist monk who travelled from india to China and essentially founded Shaolin Kung Fu). There is a layer of extra flavour, a quiet tenacity that seeks the answers in the shadows. The focus on a rural setting in modern day is refreshing as are the different folkloric and paranormal entities

This book will certainly appeal to people exploring East Asian and Asian fiction, as well as those who are seeking to try paranormal/ Psychological horror in a realm completely removed from the Western style (I would tentatively recommend it to people who enjoyed either Bulgasal or the Eastern Palace due to the tone and elements of the horror rather than a direct comparison of the entities themselves)

Kuzhali Manickavel has an elegant style, stirring a pool of environmental objects and cues into a whirling tornado that builds into absolute chaos, letting it settle and then whipping it up again, all the while, grounding the reader through Thamari's narrative and observations. A perfect book for spoopy season!

An utterly thrilling read and an author I will be adding to my must buy list

Thank you to Netgalley, the author and Angry Robot for this phenomnenal read. My review is left voluntarily and all opinions are my own

[Venneh · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a solid novel that maybe could have used a bit of trimming down, but I enjoyed the ride. We get a young village girl in India, Thamarai, who is confronted with the girls around her disappearing literally in front of her eyes and no one ever speaking of them again, and a sinister teacher whose power starts to grow in the school. We get a parallel dimension being unlocked in the school as Tharamai tries to find out what happened to the missing girls, bring them back, and confront various kinds of monsters. The pacing felt a bit stretched towards the middle, but I loved the back and forth of the narrative and the entries in the journal that Tharamai finds. Definitely worth your time this fall.

[Linda (The Arizona Bookstagrammer) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you for the free ebook Angry Robot Books @angryrobotbooks , Netgalley @netgalley , and Kuzhali Manickavel.
“A Compendium of Supernatural Entities Found in the Government Girls Higher Secondary School” by Kuzhali Manickavel. Genre: Surreal Magical Realism plus Dark Academia. Location: A small Tamil Nadu town in India.

SYNOPSIS: The Government Girls Higher Secondary School (GGHSC) is one of the most supernaturally infected places in the world. Thamarai discovers this on her 1st day of 9th Standard grade. She finds an old, dusty botany notebook in her bag, and can’t get rid of it, no matter how hard she tries. It’s actually a field guide to paranormal phenomena. Meanwhile, she’s living in a town where “…the people were singular and the weather extreme…” Places that were unforgettable, yet not memorable. Two years later, things are getting worse, and Thamarai is getting more disconnected from reality as more supernatural entities reveal themselves.

FAVORITE BITS:
⭐️Strangely beautiful descriptions:
(“Unbearably beautiful mornings sometimes happened when she was going to get her period.”)
(“Jealousy gave her terrible acidity and bad breath, but it also gave her a sense of belonging.”)
⭐️Chapters each begin with Thamarai’s story, and end with weirdly whimsical descriptions from the botany notebook/field guide.
⭐️Author also shares ugly parts of rural life: castes, head lice, malnourished girl students, skin color discrimination, teachers who abuse girl students. (“We are no one, Thamarai thought to herself.”)

I couldn’t put this horrifyingly imaginative and poignant book down as I read about the Phantom First Floor, shy handfuls of old teeth, Flower Cataract girls, and the Sand Worms of Patriotism.📚👩🏼‍🦳
#ACompendiumofSupernaturalEntitiesFoundintheGovernmentGirlsHigherSecondarySchool #NetGalley

[The Blog Without a Face · Rating 4.25 out of 5]

BWAF SINISTER SELECTION
Let’s Not Make This Title Even Longer…

“One must never assume it is just a chair.”

That’s the first page, in the voice of a committee calling itself the Association for Moral Upliftment and Universal Friendship, and it’s the rule the rest of the book follows. A chair may be an undead carnivorous bird at rest. A botany record notebook may be a bestiary. And a field guide that sorts twenty-three supernatural entities by Danger Classification, twelve of them under Harmless or thereabouts, can leave the one person in the building who is actually hurting girls off the list completely. He’s the English teacher. He has no entry. It took me half the goddamn book to see it, and why I think it’s one of the better horror books of the year.

Thamarai’s parents have jobs in two different towns, so she’s been parked with an aunt in a temple town in Tamil Nadu that the book never names and that is, by the big temple and the author’s own biography, Chidambaram. “This was a place you drove through with the windows up.” On her first day of 9th standard, sitting on the floor in the doorway because the room is full, she finds a dusty botany record notebook in her bag. She puts it on the floor by the wall. It comes back. She tries the drainage canal. It comes back. The transection drawings in it look like girls and giant insects, and the entries have danger rankings.

What you’re holding is that notebook, cut into her story: fifty-five short sections of close third person on Thamarai, and between them twenty-three entries in the format of a field guide, Name, Danger Classification, Description, Mode of Operation. The Sand Worms of Patriotism, who surface at every flag-raising to swallow two girls (always reported to look “happy and hopeful as they descend”) and who founded a group called Just Because We Hate Girls Doesn’t Mean We Are Gay. The Cine Hero, who takes a girl’s hand from around a corner, “fingers first,” and leaves her a husk with her mouth open, having decided which shampoo she’ll buy for the new house. The Little Nightmares, which root in the brain until “the host will have nothing left inside.” Suitcase Pasanga, the thin ghosts of murdered college students who come up to you at twilight and ask, in Hindi, where the nearest STD booth is. Harmless, says the committee, about a murdered kid. It would like your own notes in the pages provided at the back, no ballpoint pen, death certificates attached where applicable.

Interview: Writer Kuzhali Manickavel on her unconventional writing style, strange book titles and more - The Hindu
I read that Introduction on a Saturday and decided I knew exactly what this was: Welcome to Night Vale, the podcast that reads cosmic horror as community radio announcements, with a bestiary stapled on. I had it wrong. By page thirty a small grey old woman shuffles out of a locked room at Thamarai’s maths tuition and Thamarai, who never helps anyone with anything but always asks the elderly out of politeness, calls out “Hai paati, do you need any help?” What follows involves a jaw that drops to the floor, seven fingers on one hand, a tap, and a bar of blue washing soap, and I read it standing up, which is a stupid fucking way to read anything. Then comes the entry. Paati. “Fourteen fingers and fourteen toes. Does not consume water.” Generally harmless.

That’s the pattern. The scare lands, and then the committee files it, and the filing is funny. The Sex Demon dresses like a Tamil movie villain from the seventies, pale blue three-piece suit and a pipe, knows fuck-all about sex, and keeps a vegetable plot. When Thamarai finally corners one weeding his millets and asks why he’s called that: “I don’t know. Some idiot put that name.” His name is Mani. Roughly one section in three ends on a joke or a home remedy, and it means the dread in this book arrives in set pieces and runs under the comedy as a hum instead of driving from the front. If you need a horror novel that never lets you up for air, this isn’t it. I held it back a notch for that.

Kuzhali Manickavel was born in Winnipeg and moved to Chidambaram at thirteen; she lives in Bangalore now. Her two story collections and a chapbook came out between 2008 and 2014 from Blaft in Chennai, the small press best known over here for its anthologies of Tamil pulp fiction. The Guardian called the first collection “just very, very beautiful,” and for once the Guardian was right. This is her first novel. Angry Robot, the London genre independent under Watkins Media, has it for the world outside India, edited by Simon Spanton. Blaft has the Indian paperback. It’s written in English with the Tamil and the Tamil-English (“mood out,” “crack,” “porikki,” “vera level”) left unglossed. Angry Robot’s own description calls the book “a boundary-pushing fantasy that blends magical realism with dark academia, perfect for fans of Bunny.” Dark academia, my ass. The school has six toilets with a government funding plaque on the wall and keeps them locked, so the girls squat in the scrub behind the building in full view of the passing train, an exercise the compendium files under The Crusades. Magical realism is what publishing calls a horror novel when it has to look up where the author’s from.

Two years on, 11th standard, the year that doesn’t matter, nearly all free periods. Thamarai is famous for simply sitting there. Two tuition companions, neither of them a friend. S.T. Priya is dark and sullen and treats every compliment as mockery (“Loose-u”; “Don’t put ice”). She sings entire Tamil film songbooks in tunes she makes up on the spot. Prasanna is Brahmin, a lecturer’s daughter, light-skinned, first rank, the only person on earth who worries about Thamarai’s future, and Thamarai has been in love with her for a year, and with roughly every other girl in the room for about three days apiece. And there’s the English Sir, from a respectable family, a sticker on his bike that says There Is No God, a stump where his left ring finger should be, who every year picks a pretty 11th or 12th standard girl and talks to her in his room for hours with the door open so nobody can say anything, and asks her why she pins her half-sari where she pins it and where else she wears safety pins, until the rumours get loud enough that her family pulls her out of school and marries her off, or she becomes one of the akkas who disappeared, and “None of it was ever his fault.” This year it’s the class leader. Thamarai’s entire campaign against the bastard is to glare at him during assembly. “Frankly, he did not really know who she was.”

Nobody did.

About a quarter in she goes up the school staircase, the one good thing in the building, and there’s a flight too many, and the corridor at the top doesn’t end: a classroom holding a dust storm, another holding a dying landscape under a big red sun, a locked one with a blackness in the window she feels she could touch, and rows of small girls on the floor who don’t blink. She eats half a sugar jelly, finds the stairs again, comes down. “Nobody had even noticed she was gone.” The less anyone watches her, the more she can see. Her periods stopped when she moved here and she’s told no one. Manickavel never explains any of this and never needs to, because the structure keeps saying it for her: the girl no one keeps track of is the only one who can read the file. That’s the claim, the book builds it instead of stating it, and it’s why this is a Sinister Selection.

A thing that goes nowhere: palli mittai. Tiny candies the size and shape of lizard droppings, each one a single cumin seed in a shell of coloured sugar, and the compendium says some girls will wonder for the rest of their lives how they get the one seed in. I looked it up. There’s a rotating pan involved, apparently, and that’s as far as I got, and it’s been three days.

The entry format is the SCP Foundation’s, the collaborative wiki running since 2008 where anonymous writers file anomalous objects as containment reports with an Object Class and a clinical voice, and Manickavel lifts it whole. The haunted girls’ school where one girl sees the spirits in the stairwells and toilets is Japanese school horror’s: Hanako-san in the third stall, the Gakkou no Kaidan films of the nineties. The corridor that runs to infinity is the hallway in House of Leaves and the Backrooms, the internet’s endless empty office. The last pages borrow their shape from The Virgin Suicides, and I’ll leave it there. A careful reader could say the novelty here is a Tamil setting and a great voice on a known kit, and that reader isn’t wrong, and it’s the reason this sits where it sits instead of higher. What none of those own: a bestiary that is the girls’ own lives filed as fauna with the predator left out, and invisibility as the organ of sight. And the thing I keep coming back to, which is that three separate times in this book an act of kindness is what does the damage.

The nitpicks, and then I’m waving them off. The first fifth has one scare in it and a shitload of tuition. It’s also the funniest writing in the book, with a physics master whose free dentures, from an old student who bought his dental degree, skid around his mouth while he swears he’ll get Thamarai through “Even if I lose my life in the process!” (“Please don’t die because of me sir. Even I wouldn’t die for me.”), and it’s where the three girls get built, so no charge. The English Sir is a type, a smirk and a method and no inside at all. I went back and forth on that. Where I’ve landed, for now, is that the one thing in the school with no entry gets no interior either, on purpose, and I reserve the right to be wrong.

S.T. Priya is the book’s great creation and I didn’t know it until two-thirds through. A coward and a rumor-monger who changes sides partway in. She will shove your head under a desk for a whole chemistry period because she doesn’t feel like sitting next to you, and she’s the only one who ever asks Thamarai if she’s okay.

I spent twenty minutes after the last page looking for the notes pages at the back that the Introduction tells you to fill in. There aren’t any. No acknowledgements. No author’s note either. The book just stops and you’re left holding it.

[Sangeetha · Rating 3.5 out of 5]

Thanks to Blaft for an advanced copy. This is a 3.5 for me. However, I do wonder how international readers will take to this as there are phrases / sentences in Tamil and very culturally specific references. I enjoyed reading this more than I expected and it really left me thinking about a lot of things. This book is dark, satirical and truly mystical in its own way.

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read an eARC of this book so thank you to the author and the publisher.

This was such a strange book, but it was mesmerising. We read of a young woman, through her key educational years, but interspersed with articles in the titular compendium of supernatural entities found in the government girls higher secondary school. The compendium is so specific to the school and I thought that was wonderful. It’s so eerie to think of some of the supernatural entities and how they behave within the school. Also, the way other known supernatural beings are changed by their proximity to the school. It’s thoroughly creative and some of these beings are like nothing I’ve seen before. The author strikes a very good balance between dangerous and horrific and not so menacing, with a broad range of beings that have different threat levels and way to be managed.

Our main character finds a journal she can’t get rid of. She finds herself having difficulty studying. It’s hard to focus on the real world, her mind constantly drifting. She tries, but her mind lives in a more liminal space. It was interesting how the author blended the mundane aspects of school life with the supernatural. There’s plenty of scholarly pursuits, meals, friction between classmates. But regularly interspersed with the uncanny.

The uncanny interjects constantly. However we are also seeing the challenging expectations these girls face, the inappropriate behaviour of those in positions of power, and the complex dynamics between not quite friends. It’s a fascinating supernatural study, but the humans can behave harmfully too.

Such a wonderfully unusual read! Really clever

[Madelon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Veel dank aan Netgalley en Angry Robot voor het recensie-exemplaar. Het boek is vanaf 6 oktober te koop.

A Compendium of Supernatural Entities Found in the Government Girls Higher Secondary School (je begrijpt dat ik vanaf nu een verkorte versie van de titel gebruik) van Kuzhali Manickavel is een fantasy die maar niet weet te boeien, omdat het verhaal de hele tijd zo vlak blijft.

Thamarai is een Indiaas meisje. Op haar school verdwijnen meisjes en ook is er een kwaadaardige mannelijke leraar die steeds meer macht krijgt op school. Niemand schijnt in de gaten te hebben dat er allemaal nare dingen gebeuren op school en Thamarai, die geen zin heeft om te studeren, duikt dieper het mysterie in.

Twee problemen
Manickavel legt in A Compendium of Supernatural Entities… twee problemen van de Indiase samenleving bloot die twee kanten van dezelfde medaille zijn. Enerzijds dat niemand geeft om de meisjes en vrouwen in het land en anderzijds dat mannen daarmee ook alle mogelijkheden krijgen om kwaadaardige dingen te doen met deze meisjes en vrouwen. Het boek is behoorlijk luchtig, maar deze serieuze ondertoon is constant aanwezig.

Het probleem zit hem dan ook zeker niet in de thematiek, maar vooral in hoe het boek geschreven is. In de eerste helft gebeurt namelijk helemaal niks dat van belang is en ik was na die eerste helft al zo klaar met dit boek dat de tweede helft me helemaal niet meer interesseerde. Daarnaast kreeg ik maar geen hoogte van hoofdpersonage Thamarai. Het voelt niet alsof ik haar heb leren kennen gedurende vierhonderd pagina’s. Doordat haar personage geen diepgang krijgt en doordat er in een groot deel van het boek niks noemenswaardigs gebeurt voelt het geheel ongelooflijk vlak aan.

Het juiste publiek
Is het probleem dan dat ik niet het juiste publiek ben voor dit boek? A Compendium of Supernatural Entities… is duidelijk gericht op tieners en jonge twintigers, maar dat zou natuurlijk in principe geen enkel probleem moeten vormen. Een goed geschreven boek is immers een goed geschreven boek en ik kan ook nog steeds genieten van Annet Schaap en de boeken die ik vroeger als kind las.

Nee, dit boek is duidelijk geschreven op een manier die mij niet ligt waardoor ik geen enkele binding met het verhaal kreeg. Jammer, maar hopelijk zijn er genoeg anderen die wel kunnen genieten van deze fantasy. Voor mij was dit in ieder geval een enorme tegenvaller.

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[Srividya · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been following Kuzhali's work for over decade, which is a very boring way to say I'm a massive huge big fan! I'm amazed that this is her first novel, because it was such a smooth read, I just floated through it. I'm also amazed at how she writes so playfully and also with such emotional depth. I spent the first ten years of my life in a small town and felt like Kuzhali captured girlhood in both a universal way and in a very hyperlocal way, which is a real gift! And she did it while having so much fun, clearly. I laughed, I cried, and I tried to put a hex on English Sir.

Buy it and read it!!!

[Rehana · Rating 4 out of 5]

At the very moment when the paucity of eccentric paranormal fantasy books by female Indian authors is the centre of discussion, Kuzhali Manickavel’s well-crafted, quirky fantasy has proven to be a welcome change. This book will appeal to anyone who has attended, visited, or at least heard about experiences in government schools in rural Tamil Nadu. Since I have heard many such stories in the past, I could connect with the story in many instances.

Thamarai, the protagonist, is most likely dyslexic and what draws her attention greatly at her new school is the sudden disappearance of young girls, which goes unnoticed by many. She suspects the English teacher, who is known for his rogue behaviour with the young girls might have his hand in this. Despite his growing reputation and power, Thamarai decides to confront him and punish him for his deeds. Meanwhile, there is also an old record notebook filled with entries of paranormal entities and activities that have happened in the school. No matter what she does, the book would not leave her bag. Now, Thamarai has two things to deal with: the inappropriate English teacher and the mysterious record notebook.

As I said, the writing is quirky, mixed with social issues like patriarchal practices in small villages against women, and misuse of power in school against teen girls, with fantastical elements like a phantom first floor in school and other paranormal elements. If you are from a South Indian household, especially Tamil, then you will be able to relate better to the characters and the story in many places, unlike other readers. For others, some portions might seem unnecessary, and the use of colloquial terms may be confusing.

The mildly underwhelming aspect was that I couldn’t understand Thamarai until the very end. She was a very unusual protagonist whom I could neither love nor hate. Also, the middle portion was unnecessarily lengthy. Kind of repetitive. The rest as I said was enjoyable. Do try it if paranormal young adult fantasy with social commentary is up your alley.

[Rakesh Khanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is no better writer alive.

[Jacqueline Nyathi · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Fay Nicole · Rating 4.5 out of 5]

General thoughts
Overall, I quite enjoyed this book. Thamarai was a character who I felt disjointed from. But I also saw myself in her, mainly in her unfortunate ability to put her foot in it when speaking to the other girls without knowing she has done it. It was very slow paced, in a way that was somewhat jarring at first. And if you’re reading the physical book, it might be important to know that there aren’t any chapter numbers. The only separation is when we get another entry of the compendium. I do want to be honest and say that at times I felt like this book wasn’t for me. As it was set in a small town in India, it had a lot of Indianisms (which I have learnt from another review is the term to call these). Obviously, being a white British girl there were times that I felt quite confused, and I am sure that there were parts that I missed the full intention of as a result. But equally, I love that for those who know these idioms and such, this book is going to be brilliant. And I did still really enjoy it. I loved getting to hear about the different entities in and around the school. And how these entities affected people (regardless of their ability to see them).
My one thing I would have loved would be to get some illustrations/diagrams to go with the compendium entries. I think that would bring it all together so much more for me.
TLDR:
A slow-paced horror/fantasy filled with nature and entities and academia and Indian culture.


What I liked:
🖤The female rage
🖤The different entries
🖤The mysterious vibes of it all

What I struggled with/didn’t really like:
🖤The English Sir and his lack of consequences.
🖤There were moments where I didn’t know if something was a cultural thing or not. Or if things exist in Indian folklore or were created for this book by the author. And obviously that’s a me issue, but I do think it’s something I could’ve done better knowing prior to starting (so I could have a better background knowledge more than anything else).
🖤I really wish there was illustrations.

Favourite character/s:
Thamirai (and maybe also ST Priya)
Favourite entity:
Smiley face man (this is definitely not his name but I cannot find the page) or the Rose petal eaters.

Who this is for/recommendations:
🖤If you’d like a softer, slower paced horror set in an all girls academia setting.
🖤If you know anything about Indian culture or you want to read about it.
🖤If you would absolutely read a random old journal you found.
🖤If you want a FMC who is just as attached to her current favourite book as you are.

Minority/inclusion:
Small Indian town setting, FMC who misses social cues

I got sent a free copy of this book to share on social media. This review is entirely voluntary and completely my own opinions/ramblings. Very appreciative to the publisher for sending me this book🧡

[Joseph Chacko · Rating 4 out of 5]

What I have come to enjoy to the point of over indulgence in Kuzhali Manickavel’s works is how trance-like they are. Putting aside the labels of speculative and weird fiction used to categorise her work, it is essentially writing that explores consciousness, the world and everything in between. What is in between is often overlooked by the majority. Her characters rely primarily on the estuary of the natural and super natural for nourishment. It enables her characters to bear their extremely unfair and broken worlds that offers them little to no consolation. It helps them register their immediate circumstances which don’t have rhyme or reason.

The main character Thamarai is a high school student of the Government Girls Higher Secondary School. The GGHSS. She is far removed from reality and is sensitive to the registers of the supernatural. Like most teenagers she also is at that age wherein certain truths about the world is revealed to her and she can’t help but ask certain existential questions like what’s the point of doing anything. Most of us learn to turn a blind eye at such extremely inconvenient problems and carry on with our lives ascribing importance to worldly things like education, family and career. We also learn to live with issues like gender inequality, exploitation, corruption and call it social anomalies. Thamarai is someone who can neither bring herself to comply with the quotidian nor has the skills for it. What she is is a fearless observer. The supernatural entities that are strewn all over the school are Thamarai’s forte. She studies and understands these entities with the same rigour that her friends study Math, Physics and Chemistry. It is interesting to note that at one point when her two friends are privy to this netherworld, they are as indifferent to it as Thamarai is to the “real” world. They show no curiosity for it.

Kuzhali has generously deployed her signature brand of humour in this novel. Particularly her satirical use of long winded titles and their abbreviations.
Things like The Association of Moral Upliftment and Universal Friendship (AMUUF) that is bringing together the compendium is at once serious business and also dubious. This is a clever dig at the human tendency of setting up organisations and entities to formalise our unruly existence. They may serve certain practical functions but are taken way too seriously.

Works like these are testament to why certain books came to be called novels. This one offers great novelty in terms of reading experience. The numerous fascinating entities of the GGHSS keep the pages turning. You will at once be left sated and wanting more.

[Deepak Srinivas]

I feel like the novel format really freezes and deadens KM's whimsical writing, where a lot of the energy really comes from the way she's able to play around with the structure of the story itself, strange beginnings, hilariously abrupt endings, vignettes so fleetingly short that the burden of resolving their strangeness never catches up with them, beautifull bizzare narrative devices, there's a kind of crackling electricity in her collection of short fictions.

GGHHSS is a little less lively; the compendium itself is very lackluster with pretty generic existential/paranormal horrors although i did love how intensely textured it was with tamil culture - the best parts of this story is the account of small town life and school life, the plodding directionless melancholy of it, and the character of thamarai herself, all narrated with tone that switches seamlessly between a hilarious deadpanness and the overpowering ennui of being a powerless individual in an institution that does not care about you, besieged by lecherous men on all sides. KM's writing always sticks with you because of that violent duality, how quickly the comedy whiplashes into sadness. And the dialogue, god, it is so funny, it has such a tamil cadence to it, had me giggling and kicking my feet. Which is why I'm pleasantly surprised at how well it's doing internationally, although marketing it as 'dark academia' and 'perfect for fans of bunny' seems a bit deceitful 😭

And the characterization of thamarai, god; had to put down the book several times because I had flashbacks to my own horrible times at school, the feeling of being absolutely out of place, unmoored, directionless, dissociated and always being ten steps behind everyone, not mischievous, not a punk or anything, just terrible at everything, and not clued in on this indecipherable language that everyone already knows. I love how KM never offers up any platitudes to resolve this, she never says you'll turn out fine, you'll make it in life; we will just remain these strange, difficult contradictions. Love this passage towards the end.

“I’m worried about how badly I’m going to fail,” said Thamarai.
S.T. Priya stared at her. “Really?” she said. “I thought you didn’t care.”
“I don’t. But sometimes I feel bad about my studies. And I think, what future can there be for me?”
“You’re not meant for studying, Thamarai. Just leave it,” said S.T. Priya. She didn’t say it in a consoling kind of way. It was more like she was stating a fact.
“Do you think I’m meant for something else?” asked Thamarai.
S.T. Priya shook her head. “I don’t know what is going to happen to you.”

[sedge · Rating 4.5 out of 5]

This book is brilliant. It's weird, occasionally gross, frequently funny, and intensely, even breathtakingly, familiar -- which might sound odd, given that I have never been a high school student in small-town Tamil Nadu? (Though I have been an isolated queer teenager, so.) But that's one of the strengths of Manickavel's work: while it is grounded in a particular place and experience of a(n aspect of a) particular culture, it also renders that specific intensity of teenaged emotion, where you feel everything but don't understand very much at all.

The Government Girls Higher Secondary School is overrun by countless supernatural entities, but these are also figures of the particular hell of being a teenaged girl in a patriarchal culture, one where you and your friends are helpless against harassment and assault and subject to near-total educational indifference because, as you tell each other resignedly, "we're no one." The entities' names (like "Sex Demon" and "Sandworm of Patriotism") suggest that in many ways, they serve the girls as tools for describing shitty reality and distancing themselves from it; the school itself is a microculture that passes down knowledge of how to understand and get by.

Manickavel's text, then, shares some standard genre assumption about allegory/figurative works, but it also confronts these head-on. The guidebook that Thamarai finds says at one point,

Engaging with the supernatural has often been likened to coming to terms with one’s own homosexuality, in that these two things have nothing in common with each other.... Researchers have noted with some surprise that one of the biggest questions people have regarding the supernatural in the GGHSS is whether it will make them gay. The answer is yes, it will absolutely make you very gay. If you are reading this right now, it is because you are gay.

The real is figured; alienation is allegorical but also real. It's monstrous but monsters are also just allegories but not really. Manickavel balances the different valences around genre elements with verve and originality. It's just so good.

I love this whole book. I love how funny it is, as well how unique the entities are, but it's also brutally honest and so moving. This is the kind of speculative fiction I long for.

[star · Rating 5 out of 5]

a mysterious notebook with descriptions of supernatural entities that live in her school finds its way into thamarai's hands, and she can't seem to get rid of it. as she struggles with her studies, the world of the spirits that live side by side with reality draws her in more and more.

while the story is set in a rural indian town, it felt very familiar to me as a southeast asian—here every school has its own "horror" stories, though more often than not the spirits are really just beings that occupy the same space. the concept of the spirits being so intertwined with the school that there's research on them is so endearing to me. i also just love the way the compendium is presented in between the narrative; it's a good way of worldbuilding when the main character is generally unaware of her surroundings, and it reminds me a bit of SCP.

although the synopsis might give off the idea that the book is more plot-focused, the story is really a character study. it takes us through thamarai's life as an outsider in her all-girls school: a young queer kid whose prospects in life is entirely dictated by traditional society's expectation that she will marry and devote herself to a man. she exists in a liminal space where the real world and the supernatural world interact, yet she's the only one who can see the spirits around them. she goes through the motions of what is expected of her, but not quite in the right ways. and amidst all this, the adults in school and in tuition class only care about what she should do or what she should be. the perverse and systemic mistreatment of young girls is seen as just a fact of life, getting blamed for causing their own suffering. spirits as a manifestation of trauma, of repressed feelings and lost history. how one can see the truths of the world so clearly yet still be unable to harness it.

i appreciate how the story keeps its humour while touching hard subjects very delicately. one of my favourite pieces of lit fic now. thank you to netgalley and angry robot for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[ezra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and Angry Robot for this ARC!

Rating: 4.25 Stars rounded down.

“A Compendium of Supernatural Entities Found in the Government Girls Higher Secondary School” by Kuzhali Manickavel is an incredibly absurd, immensely entertaining work that, to me, is difficult to define. We join Thamarai at her high school in a small Tamil Nadu town, both of which seem to be full of unexplainable events and supernatural entities. But then Thamarai discovers a mysterious notebook, which seems to be full of descriptions of the paranormal phenomena she has seemingly been experiencing, invisible to everyone else.

I absolutely loved this book. It takes a minute to get into it and to get attuned to what kind of character (and narrator) Thamarai is, but once you’ve gotten there you can’t help but want to just wrap her in bubble wrap and set up an actual support system for her. She is constantly absentminded, casual in the face of the most bizarre situations, often honest to a fault.

Now I have to clarify that I am, at best, tangentially familiar with Indian cultures and society. Therefore I am certainly not the best judge, but to me this book reads as if it is deeply steeped in and representative of the culture one would find in a small town in this region of India. While a lot of this book is absurd, such as the supernatural entities, Manickavel also tackles several social issues, most of all the misogyny and harassment these young girls face.

I’m also just such a sucker for books that play a little with format, and the way the entries into the compendium were used in this one was wonderful.

I don’t think that this is a book with a particularly exciting or high-stakes plot, but the meandering journey we take through Thamarai’s life is absolutely one I recommend taking. Absurd in the absolute best way, fun but also, at times, heartache inducing. A wonderful read!

[Alexandra Townsend · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley, Angry Robot Books, and the author for an eARC of this book in exchange for my honest feedback.

I was really excited about this book when I requested it, but I am not the target audience for this one. Since requesting, I’ve read Bunny and Motherthing which this book is compared to. Had I read them prior to seeing this on NetGalley, I likely would have skipped over requesting this one.

The dialogue was really difficult for me to follow along and I think that’s just a cultural difference. This book is set in India and I found myself unable to follow the conversations between the characters. I was reading with my eyes, but it was difficult for me to process what I was physically reading.

The magical realism was apparent from the start and I did quite enjoy the world building. I loved the different supernatural field guide entries and think that was the strongest part of the book, without a doubt.

The pacing and storytelling just did not keep my attention, no matter how much the main character interested me. I found myself avoiding picking this one up and every page felt like a slog from how long it was taking me to process dialogue.

If you are someone who is either from India or is well versed in South Asian storytelling, this could absolutely be a win for you. There were moments I genuinely laughed through this so I don’t think this is a bad book necessarily - I’m just not the target audience and that’s okay!

[Armina · Rating 4.25 out of 5]

I'm not from South Asia, but this felt like a good look at what being a poor teenage girl living in a small town in India would be like. Thamarai is incapable of studying and has no prospects for her future (which were already limited from the start). She spends her time just kind of floating through life, not really attaching herself to anything. The only thing special though is that she can see the supernatural, and it seems like the only thing that has kept her interest.

This book offers a really good character study. It also touches a lot on men (especially men in positions of power) being horrible towards young girls, and the rumor mill that can grow around that, in a way that felt very realistic. Now that I think about it, for a book centering a lot on the supernatural, it was very grounded in reality.

I must also mention the titular supernatural entities. I'm not used to seeing non-Western creatures, so this felt very fresh in that sense. They were very steeped in South Asian culture, as well as very grounded in the school setting, which made it very unique.

By the way, I think the description makes it seem as if there's more plot to this then there actually is. It's definitely a character-driven story, and I think it's a shame, because I'm sure people will go into it with the wrong expectations.

Thank you to Angry Robot and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC.

[Julie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thamarai is a student adrift.. She attends a school where she doesn't study, has friends who aren't friendly, and she can see horrors--both real and imaginary. She finds a book that only she understands outlining all the weird beings she is encountering, and this absorbs her attention, keeping her from connecting with anyone or her rapidly-approaching future.

This book was a little less horror and a little more existential sadness than I expected. It feels like a surreal representation of systemic misogyny. A microcosm of slipstream angst and despair. While Thamarai is able to defeat and outwit the supernatural dangers, the human ones remain a constant threat despite her anger and bravery. I loved how Manickavel depicted the varying ways women defeat themselves through Thamarai and her schoolmates--the fawn, freeze, and flight embodied. In a world where women don't have power, there are no good options.

The culture and language were a bit too mysterious for me at times despite my love of experiencing another culture through reading, and even with translate I didn't always understand what was being said or its significance. I sometimes felt as adrift as Thamarai did.

I remember what it's like to feel dissociated, traumatized, and disconnected throughout school. This book captures that numb terror quite well.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

[John Rennie · Rating 5 out of 5]

The very best magical realism will leave you wondering what if anything really happened, and this is amongst the best magical realism I have read. There is always the danger of reading more into a book than the author intended, but it seems to me this book explores so many themes relevant to students (not just female students) in today's India.

However be warned that the author makes no concessions to readers unfamiliar with Indian culture. I have a lot of Indian friends, including in Tamil Nadu where the story is set, but even so I spent a lot of time Googling phrases in the book that were unfamiliar to me. There is a real danger readers could find themselves alienated by the writing and fail to enjoy the book at all.

And that would be a shame because this book works on lots of levels. Superficially it's a story about the hapless but engaging Thamarai (the name means lotus flower) but it's also about the inadequacies of the Indian educational system, the parlous position of females in rural Indian society , and probably other issues I haven't realised yet. And it's written in a whimsical style that does not rub the readers face in it.

I'm not sure I can recommend this to everyone as I think many readers will just be mystified with it, but for me this was an easy five star read.

[rebeccareads · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderfully weird and unsettling, A Compendium of Supernatural Entities Found in the Government Girls Higher Secondary School delivers on its promise to push boundaries. Kuzhali Manickavel weaves a strange, creeping tale of a girl at first only trapped by her surroundings, then terrified by them as daily life at her school takes a turn for the supernatural.

I enjoyed the field-guide setup, and was totally engaged by the entries detailing the various entities. They're eerie, inventive, and though mostly more on the whimsical side, at times a bit horrific - all-around a great tool for setting the atmosphere. It's definitely an atmosphere-heavy book, not particularly driven by plot or even characters, but I enjoyed the vibes so I didn't mind. I did, however, find the pacing to be a little off - I'm not convinced that the premise would work better as a short story, since there's a lot going on here and a lot of it is compelling, but I definitely wanted to get into the action sooner.

That aside, fans of weird, boundary-pushing horror absolutely shouldn't miss A Compendium of Supernatural Entities Found in the Government Girls Higher Secondary School. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC!

[B K178 · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to love 'A Compendium of Supernatural Entities Found in the Government Girls Higher Secondary School' by Kuzhali Manickavel. The premise—a Tamil Nadu government girls' school filled with supernatural beings and a mysterious notebook—was the kind of quirky, literary horror that usually appeals to me. However, I found it difficult to become fully engaged. The atmosphere is well-crafted, and some moments are quite unsettling, but I never connected deeply with Thamarai or the story. I kept waiting for the pieces to come together, and while I appreciated the intent, it didn’t fully draw me in.

That said, I enjoyed how the supernatural elements blended into everyday school life. The horror isn't just about ghosts or strange creatures; it also reflects real teenage experiences of power, isolation, and fear. These themes were among the strongest aspects of the novel.

Overall, this seems to be a book that focuses more on mood and symbolism than plot. If that's your style, it might resonate more with you than it did with me. I understand why it has its audience—it just wasn't the right fit for me. Readers may wish to check out CWs beforehand. Thanks to NetGalley and Angry Robot for the ARC and the opportunity to review.

[Lungmying Lepcha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Government schools are one of the wierdly built places and especially in a girls schools one is bound to find a supernatural element. In this compendium we are taken along a journey to a Government Girls Higher Secondary School in a unnamed town where this school is located there is something off about the town itself and the school being the center of every supernatural activity to ever occur in the town.

As Thamarai our protagonist faces a hard time to adjust in this environment we are taken to different phases how Thamarai feels.
She finds a record notebook where every Supernatural element found in this town is described.
Whimsical, creepy you name it you are bound to find them in this unnamed town.
Amul babies, flower girls, Phantom First Floor, Patti
all intricately woven into a web where Thamarai struggles to get out.

In a lost world of Thamarai where she sees poetry in physics and finds it difficult to solve basic mathematic equations she indeed stands unique to others and maybe that is the reason she is the only one who can read the contents of the record notebook and even fills it.

Set in a typical areas of the South with every aspects of life stiched into this compendium.

[Reactor Magazine]

"A Compendium of Supernatural Entities Found in the Government Girls Higher Secondary School is one of the most delightful books I’ve read in a minute; Kuzhali Manickavel’s debut novel oozes the sort of rare swagger that one can’t learn, and can only hope to be born with. This is a one-sitting read that has something for everyone: There’s singing and demonic imposter Pepsi and sapphic currents of girlschool drama. The latter brims with fantastically entertaining, at times too-real neurosis—a very familiar neurosis that sparked real joy in me, a survivor of a very different sort of girls school that still speaks a kindred language, because all girls’ schools are different variations of the same coming-of-age horror show. This is a work built on surgically precise deep cuts of teen anthropology, lowkey cosmic horror, encyclopedic Kollywood (Tamil cinema) references, devastating drollness, and perhaps the most universal condition of all: anxiety diarrhea."

Read Alexis Ong's review of A Compendium of Supernatural Entities Found in the Government Girls Higher Secondary School at Reactor