"Bangkok at Songkran runs on water guns, red Fanta for the spirits, and very old fans"
Ana Beatriz 'Bia' Santos is twenty-three, a frevo dancer from Recife who counts the whole world in eights. She has danced in the back row of everything, because every time a choreographer says 'Santos, come to the front', her legs stop working. Her resort show in Macau has just closed, and she has until 23:59 on the fifteenth of April to film a sixty-second original dance in Bangkok, front and centre, for a place on the biggest girl-group tour in Asia. She arrives two days before Songkran carrying her avó's seventy-year-old frevo umbrella and one instruction: bring it back or don't come back.
The Fan Room Hostel sits in a wire-tangled soi between Khao San and Rambuttri under a banner that says NO AIRCON. ALL VIBES., and its lobby is a museum of fans. Ploy on reception films the guests for TikTok. Her aunt, Na Pranee, owns the place. Lung Sombat, who is seventy and fixes everything, has looked after the great ceiling fan for fifty-one years and leaves a single old screw on the spirit house by the steps. The staff call the new Partner Hub Khai Dao, the fried egg, because its ring glows like a yolk when it's thinking. The Wi-Fi password is BigFanOfYou. In the big fifth-floor dorm are Gord, a Canadian who has been here since 2011; Magda, a Polish dentist with four water pistols and a grudge; Yuki, a Tokyo sound-effects artist recording the fan in the dark; Wanjiru, who reads every word of the house rules; and Kai, the Hawaiian carpenter who can't stop knocking on wood. Then Hunter Blake arrives, backwards, filming himself: Hydro Hunter, 2.1 million subscribers, tactical water warfare, with an orange tank on his back called the Monsoon, his cousin Mason carrying everything else, and his heart set on bed nine, directly under the fan.
On the first evening the dial turns itself up, and the fan flings fifty years of black oil across the room. Yuki hears the tick that comes every eight turns drifting off the beat, and Bia, who can't stop counting, hears it too. Kai rubs the pale dust from Hunter's pillow between his fingers and recognises termite frass, though everybody knows termites don't eat teak. When the guests take their evidence to FreeToWander, they learn the Hub has created an official Partner Event instead: the Songkran Dorm Wars. Bia still has a video to make, front and centre, before the deadline. On the night of the fourteenth, thirty-one people pack into Yai Lom with buckets and balloons, and Hunter goes live.
Age: 23
Type: Frevo dancer from Recife
Fatal Flaw: Counts everything in eights, and freezes the moment she's asked to stand at the front
Role: Protagonist
Age: —
Type: "Hydro Hunter" water-warfare YouTuber
Fatal Flaw: Wants the throne bed, the biggest tank and a haunted fan, all on camera
Role: Victim
Age: 24
Type: Hawaiian carpenter, fresh from Dublin
Fatal Flaw: Swore that Holiday Kai don't knock, then knocked
Role: Ally
Age: 46
Type: Dentist from Gdańsk
Fatal Flaw: Spent twenty-two years eating only what Tomasz liked, and Tomasz liked potatoes
Role: Medic
Age: 70
Type: Handyman who helped carry the big fan upstairs fifty-one years ago
Fatal Flaw: Tells the spirit of the land what the man from Public Works never wrote down
Role: Keeper of the fan
Age: ???
Type: Mysterious presence
Fatal Flaw: None documented
Role: Observer
From the Prologue, "Grandmother Wind"
At four in the morning, Khao San Road sounded like a party that had forgotten how to stop.
Lung Sombat could hear it from the fifth floor of the Fan Room Hostel, through the louvred windows that had not closed properly since 1983: the last reggae bar thumping out a Bob Marley song for the four hundredth time that week, a tuk-tuk coughing awake, a girl somewhere laughing the way people only laughed at four in the morning on Khao San, a laugh with a bucket of rum and Red Bull in it. Under all of that he could hear the city itself, the enormous warm breath of Bangkok. It never really went to sleep. It only turned down the volume and waited for the sun.
And over his head, inside all of it, he could hear Grandmother.
Tick.
He stood in the doorway of the big dorm with his broom and his rag and his tin of machine oil and listened to her turning. Sixteen bunks, all of them empty for one more night; the Songkran crowds would arrive tomorrow and the day after, and after that there would be no quiet in this room until the water ran out. The mattresses were stripped. The mosquito nets were knotted up out of the way. The floor tiles, the old green-and-cream ones from his boss's father's time, had been mopped so clean they reflected the streetlight coming through the louvres in long orange stripes.
In the middle of the ceiling, where the old teak beam ran the length of the room, Grandmother turned on speed one.
The farang guests called her "the big fan". Na Pranee's niece Ploy, who ran the hostel's TikTok and called everything "iconic", called her "the icon". On the booking app she was the "authentic 1970s statement fan (no aircon, all vibes!)". But Sombat had known her for fifty-one years, since the day a truck brought her up from the port with nine of her sisters in wooden crates stamped with Japanese characters. He had been nineteen, with arms like rope, and he had helped Khun Chalerm, Na Pranee's father, carry her up four flights of stairs, because the Siam Breeze Hotel was going to be the most modern hotel on this soi and modern meant ceiling fans. And Khun Chalerm, sweating, laughing, had slapped the iron motor housing and said, This one is the grandmother. She will cool the whole floor. She will outlive us all.
He had been right about the second part, at least.
She was huge. Five steel blades, each as long as a grown man's arm and as wide as his hand, painted a pale hospital green that had gone yellow with fifty years of cigarette smoke and cooking steam and farang sunscreen. Her motor housing was the size and shape of a pumpkin, cast iron, with a little brass plate riveted to the side: TYPHOON KING · OSAKA · 1973. She weighed thirty-eight kilos. Sombat knew this because in 1998 he had carried her down, and weighed her on the rice scale in the kitchen, and carried her back up.
Fictional reviews of the fictional Fan Room Hostel, quoted from the book.
☠ "songkran is fully booked. we are big fans. risk accepted. ☠" — @HostelReaper
☠ "she counted correctly. dorm wars noted. exposure: high." — @HostelReaper