The perfect book to celebrate Chinese New Year is a 250-year-old tome full of ghosts, demons, monsters, monks and more

Sometimes the mood is one of enchantment and melancholy, of moonlit evenings when soft rain mists the windows and memories lie heavy on the heart. More often, though, Pu Songling’s Strange Tales From a Chinese Studio calls to mind a collection of mildly racy club stories or lost episodes of The Twilight Zone.

Reading this beloved classic provides a particularly enjoyable way to help celebrate Chinese New Year. The festivities for the Year of the Pig officially start on February 5 but have already launched and will continue until February 19. Strange Tales From a Chinese Studio will last readers the entire two weeks and more. While several English versions exist, John Minford’s Penguin selection of 104 stories is arguably the best, in part because of its scholarly introduction and abundant endnotes, most of which incorporate some of Pu Songling’s own commentary on his work.

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Born in 1640, Pu Songling worked at various clerical jobs in the northern province of Shandong. He died in 1715, leaving behind almost 500 accounts of the wondrous, eerie and grotesque, some derived from oral narratives. Finally printed in 1766, Strange Tales From a Chinese Studio overflows with ghosts, demons, monsters, monks, magicians, revived corpses, gods and fox-spirits, these last being vampiric creatures that assume the outward form of attractive men or women.

Love is a recurrent theme, often between a studious young man and an enigmatic beauty of unknown background who, alas, generally turns out to be a revenant or were-vixen. Invariably, the couple make love – Pu treats sex quite matter-of-factly – and the human protagonist soon thereafter wastes away and dies, though not always.

Fast paced, surprisingly light in tone, emotionally cool, wryly humorous – these uncanny tales, often just one or two pages long, might almost be adult bedtime stories. Sometimes Pu claims to have heard them from a relative or passer-by, thus adding an introductory fillip of verisimilitude, but at other times he plunges directly into the action with an abruptness and simplicity reminiscent of Chekhov. Consider the following three opening sentences:

“A youth by the name of Zhao, from Yishui, was on his way home from a commission in town when he caught sight of a girl in white standing by the side of the road, weeping and seemingly in great distress.” (“The Girl From Nanking”)