Literature / Diary Of A Bomoh

Diary of a Bomoh is an Urban Fantasy / Horror novel by Kit Sun Cheah.

Detective Ibrahim's police unit breaks into a flat in Singapore and finds a body surrounded by ritualistic paraphernalia. The corpse has decomposed so badly that it has no identifying marks and there are no papers present which name the deceased, leaving the police in the dark as to the man's identity. Even more concerning, however, are a series of bizarre supernatural events which afflict the police once they enter the apartment: a scream with no apparent source, a wave of horrible cold, and the consecrated crests on their uniforms turning black. Fortunately for Ibrahim, he's able to find a set of diaries in a locked drawer, and so in conjunction with his fellow policeman (and trained faith healer) Officer Jafri, he resolves to translate the books and figure out what happened.

The narrative them jumps back to the first diary entry, in which the nameless narrator is told by his father that he has the potential to become a bomoh, or sorcerer. As the entries continue on, the bomoh describes his studies and progression towards mastering both sihar (magic based on Malaysian Mythology) and silat (a traditional Malay martial art). As he becomes more powerful, he grows increasingly proud and disdainful of the people around him, and his endless ambition draws him into greater and greater evil.

Meanwhile, in the present, Ibrahim and Jafri struggle to translate the diary and figure out what happened to the corpse, but a series of bizarre 'accidents' begins to plague both the investigation and them personally.

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Diary of a Bomoh provides examples of the following tropes:

• Always Need What You Gave Up: The bomoh's family loved him deeply and initially would do anything to support him. However, the bomoh kept practicing magic even as his mother and sister became more and more uneasy about it. He finally wound up driving them away by refusing to quit his studies, and then he did nothing when his father tried to curse them and succeeded in horribly tormenting them for a time until they found a capable exorcist. As a result, they totally cut off contact with him, and so after his father died and he found himself broke and crippled, he had nobody to look out for him.
• Always Someone Better:
  • After spending most of the story as one of the most powerful magicians around, the bomoh runs into a superior rival while in the middle of summoning a very powerful jinn. The rival easily banishes the jinn, beats the bomoh in a martial arts fight, and then wrecks most of the jinn that the bomoh proceeds to send after him.
  • The bomoh's father runs into this too. He sends a jinn after his wife and daughter to punish them for leaving, but the wife and daughter eventually find a skilled faith healer who is able to crush the strongest jinn that the father sends after them.
• Apocalyptic Log: The diary cuts off just before the bomoh was going to summon an immensely powerful jinn in order to deal with his rival. The bomoh's body is found a few weeks later.
• Arc Words: 'Flowers without fruit.' This is how the bomoh describes the non-lethal variants of silat which he encounters in dojos and competitions: those variants have a lot of moves which look cool, but they're all for show and don't include anything that would be actually useful in a real fight. The words wind up applying to the bomoh himself, who in the 2017-2018 section of the diaries has all the outward appearances of success but hasn't reaped any rewards which he feels are meaningful. It also applies to the bomoh's religious activities; he continues to present himself as a devout Muslim by praying and invoking Allah, but his imam makes it clear he's turned away from the faith in every meaningful sense, and at the botched exorcism it's finally proven that Allah is no longer empowering the bomoh and his attempts to appear pious are just a charade.
• At Least I Admit It: The bomoh justifies his use of black magic by telling himself that his customers are just as evil and apostate as he is, but he at least acknowledges what he does while his customers come to him for help with their problems and then go back to acting like pious Muslims who would never resort to evil magic.
• Bad Powers, Bad People: The bomoh's powers are certainly bad; he uses potions and talismans to brainwash people into loving him or serving him, he casts horrible spells on people he's paid to target which range from burning their houses down to destroying their relationships, and he tortures ghosts to get lottery numbers. He's also a sociopath who cares only about himself and sees the people around him as tools or sheep.
• Be Careful What You Wish For:
  • The bomoh wanted Diana to fall in love with him and cast a spell on her to make that happen. The spell works and she becomes fanatically devoted to him... to the point where, when her parents find out about the relationship and ban her from seeing him, she slashes her wrists.
  • Later in his life, when the bomoh decides he now wants a girlfriend who is completely subservient to him, he first uses magic to attract a girl who matches his other demands (e.g., she's pretty, intelligent, into kink, brings in enough money that he won't have to bother providing for her, etc.) and then bewitches her to follow his every order. When she discovers that she has an STD and is also pregnant after he takes her to an orgy, she blows up his phone with texts and calls begging to know what to do because she's no longer capable of acting for herself. This drives the bomoh crazy, as he's already dealing with stress on account of his father's declining health, and he breaks up with her.
  • The bomoh wants an easy national service role where he won't have to drill and will be able to spend his time as he pleases. He gets such a role and finds it painfully boring.
  • More generally, the bomoh wishes to be set apart from the rest of society so that he doesn't have to interact with the people he thinks are beneath him. By the end of the book he's indeed apart from them, in that he has no friends, no family, and nobody who cares about him or even associates with him besides the jinn he's enslaved.
• Being Evil Sucks:
  • The bomoh thinks that he can use his evil magic to easily make a fortune and breeze through life without having to work a standard job, put effort into making himself attractive, or do any of the other things that 'normal' people do. But even when he manages to pull this off and make some money or magically enslave a girlfriend, he finds himself bored, unfulfilled, and unable to enjoy life.
  • Furthermore, as the years go on, the negative consequences of his magic increasingly outweigh the positive ones. There are several instances when he's injured or otherwise hurt by the jinn he summons, and both his health and his magical ability degrade as he continues to cast evil spells.
  • Though the bomoh had hoped that being an evil magician would enable him to set his own schedule and just work whenever he felt like it, he finds that between handling business, dealing with clients, and recovering from the effort of casting magic, spells he winds up working longer hours than the people who work the 9-5 jobs he despises. At one point he notes derisively that his one 'normal' job (an internship which he was required to take in order to complete his schooling) allowed him more free time than his magical one.
  • One of the bomoh's motivations for becoming a wizard was to not have to deal with people he despised, but he finds he still has to because he needs to keep hunting for clients.
  • His mother and sister abandon him and his father after they decide they can't bear to live with bomohs anymore, and his father's attempts to curse them rebounds on him, wrecking his apartment and deepening the bomoh's problems.
  • The bomoh focused monomaniacally on magic and martial arts and never got another job, attended a good university, or learned any mundane skills at all, meaning he has absolutely nothing to fall back on once his business dries up and it becomes apparent he can't simply use jinn to make himself a millionaire.
  • Due to the bomoh's evil deeds, he is ultimately exiled from his local mosque, martial arts school, and even Singapore's BDSM scene, leaving him completely alone.
  • By the end of his life, the bomoh is nearly broke, has almost no magic left, has been badly injured from a fight with a particularly skilled magician, and his closest companions are the delivery drivers who bring him the food he is no longer physically able to get for himself.
  • The bomoh's father also runs into this when their family falls apart, he fails to get his revenge, and then he dies an agonizing death from lung cancer. The imam tells the bomoh that his father regretted his evil deeds on his deathbed.
• Bondage Is Bad: The bomoh's moral degradation is accentuated once he gets into BDSM. He likes kink primarily because he likes the idea of dominating and enslaving other people. He's ultimately banned from Singapore's kink scene after he abandons Amber, whom he'd enslaved via magic, after she got pregnant.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: The bomoh is genuinely smart, but while he's willing to put time into activities that he values such as learning martial arts and magic, he rarely puts real effort into less entertaining but more mundane tasks that still need to be done. As a result, when he does try to achieve a mundane goal like getting a car or opening up a martial arts school, he's unable to overcome even minor obstacles in his path and he consequently makes little or no progress.
• Deathbed Confession: The bomoh's father's final words are to teach the bomoh how to summon the family jinn.
• Demonic Possession: One of the tasks that the bomoh and his father are hired for is to exorcise people. Later, the detectives also have to do this as they continue their investigation and the jinn attached to the diaries become irate.
• Didn't Think This Through: Despite the bomoh's intelligence, his arrogance and pride lead him to assume he can just get through any difficulties with his magic, and so his plans are often shortsighted. For instance, after learning martial arts in Indonesia for a few years, he returns to Singapore and decides to open a martial arts school — but he never bothered to get a certificate from the Indonesian school's guru verifying his skills, which makes it virtually impossible for him to find clients. Moreover, since he studied at his Indonesian school but didn't think to actually try to teach there, the guru isn't willing to give him a teaching certification on the grounds that while he proved he can do the arts, he never showed he could teach them. He thus has to go back to Indonesia and pay the guru more money for the privilege of being his teaching assistant, which costs him a substantial amount of funds and further delays his plans.
• Divine Punishment: After the imam exiles the bomoh from the community, the bomoh tries to proceed as usual and lands a client who needs his wife exorcised. The exorcism goes wrong when the possessing jinn resists the bomoh's magic and proclaims that Allah is no longer with the bomoh. The bomoh is still able to complete the exorcism by, essentially, beating the jinn out of her, but it's clear his spells no longer have divine power.
• Dying Alone: The bomoh's ultimate fate.
• Exact Words: The bomoh notes that one must be very precise when demanding favors from jinn, because they'll give you what you ask for but not necessarily what you want. He gives an example of someone asking for fame and then having a jinn make him go viral for doing something stupid or embarrassing on camera. As the diaries continue and the bomoh ability to focus on anything besides magic degrades, he makes several of these mistakes himself:
  • The bomoh first runs into this problem himself when he demands a jinn make the military doctors think he's not capable of being a soldier so that he doesn't get an onerous national service requirement; the jinn does this by having him be hit by a truck and breaking both his legs, after which he is indeed exempted from national service.
  • Later, the bomoh is reduced to desperate financial circumstances and resumes his old practice of torturing ghosts into giving him winning lottery numbers, only for the ghost to give him lottery numbers that are indeed winning — for a different category of bet than the one he made.
  • His guardian jinn's excuse for not helping him during his fight with the rival magician is that he had only ordered the jinn to protect him from 'blades, bullets, poison, and anything that might cause death.' The rival magician didn't use a gun, knives, or poison — just his hands and a flashlight — and he wasn't going to land any lethal blows, so the jinn couldn't do anything.
• Fetus Terrible: The bomoh's father sells someone a toyol, a charm which contains the spirit of a dead fetus and can be made to steal money and spy on people.
• Hidden in Plain Sight: The bomoh's father teaches him that he must look like a good member of the community so people will not become suspicious of him and so even the people who know he uses magic, like their imam, will still think he's a good person who only uses magic to banish demons or otherwise help people.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • Following his father's advice, he refused to put money into his health investment account, figuring he could just use his magic to cashflow any medical crises which might require expenses. At the end of the book, when he's badly injured, he's lost most of his magic and thus can't make up the money he had to pay the hospital.
  • The bomoh uses magic to get a cushy national service job which doesn't require much work besides attending a couple of two-week deployments, and he further delays those deployments as long as he can. When he's finally at one of those deployments the crypto market crashes again, and because he's away and doesn't have access to a smartphone (as per the deployment rules), he's unable to get out of his positions before losing almost everything.
  • In the end, the bomoh summons an extremely powerful jinn which had been enslaved by his grandfather many years ago. The bomoh is so weak, however, that the jinn is able to escape from his control and kill him.
• Hypocrite:
  • The bomoh refuses to hire prostitutes, saying such a relationship would be fake and therefore beneath him. However, he has no problem using magic to brainwash women to love him, even though that's just as fake.
  • The bomoh is enraged when he shows up for an Internet date only to find that the woman he's meeting used an old picture which presents her as much more attractive than she actually is. He leaves, mentally denouncing dishonest people who try to fool others, even though he himself is keeping much more significant secrets (such as his use of dark magic) which he has no intention of telling any of the women he tries to sleep with.
• Irony:
  • The bomoh disdains the people around him, seeing them as sheep who will spend their lives obeying rules and throwing away their best years to work a meaningless 9-5 job just because society says so. As he develops his magic business, he finds himself having to market, network, and do other standard business tasks, and by the end he realizes he's spending more time doing those tasks than a normal 9-5 job would ever demand from him.
  • The bomoh doesn't want to be called up for national service and uses magic to ensure that, if he does have to go, he'll get a job in which he doesn't have to drill or fight but can instead spend his time focusing on his studies. Once he's finally called up for service, he's indeed assigned to a unit comprised of people who aren't capable of doing actual military work and so are mostly ordered to sit around the barracks all day. He finds himself bored senseless.
  • The bomoh takes great pride in breaking from tradition and syncretizing various other magical practices into his own work (which would traditionally use only spells and rituals from Malay culture). But then, when he finally has the first real martial arts fight of his adult life, he loses when his rival eschews the traditional hand-to-hand restrictions, pulls out a flashlight, and blinds him for long enough to get the drop on him.
• It's All About Me: The bomoh comes to believe this, thinking that other people are just worthless sheep whom he has the right to exploit for his pleasure. At one point, when he botches an exorcism and only completes it by essentially beating the demon out of the possessed person, his biggest worry is that he'll have to give the customer a discount to account for the hospital bill the possessed person will need to pay.
• Kung-Fu Wizard: The bomoh eventually becomes skilled both in casting spells and in martial arts.
• Laser-Guided Karma: The bomoh is warned early on by his imam that, if he uses his spiritual powers for evil, he may lose his powers and suffer other karmic consequences. After spending more than a decade using his magic to hurt people, he indeed finds that his spells are failing and his energy is fading away.
• Logical Weakness: The bomoh is genuinely skilled at magic and martial arts, but he never makes any effort to get along with people or learn about business, even disdaining his business classes at school as pointless and refusing to 'waste' his time getting certifications or other things that might help in the business world. This completely wrecks him later when he finds that, no matter how good he is at magic and martial arts, it won't matter if he can't reliably attract paying clients to his dojo or his magic practice. He can't even get another job because he didn't bother getting any qualifications or experience that he can admit to.
• Love Potion: He makes one for Diana and it works so well that she not only sleeps with him but attempts suicide when her parents make her stop seeing him. By the time he meets Amber, he's given up on love and just casts obedience magic on her instead.
• Never My Fault: The bomoh blames other people for the problems his magic creates, such as when the bewitched Diana attempts suicide after her parents block her from seeing him and he simply concludes that she's crazy and not worth more of his time. Even near the end of his life, when all of his plans have failed, he refuses to accept the possibility that he was responsible for screwing up his own life.
• Nigh-Invulnerability: The bomoh thinks he has this after binding a powerful tiger jinn to guard him, and this belief is reinforced when a possessed woman slashes him with a knife but does no damage. However, he later learns that his invulnerability only applies to certain kinds of attacks; against others, he's quite vulnerable indeed.
• No Social Skills: The detectives note that the bomoh never bothered to learn how to get along with people, relying instead on magic such as charisma talismans. This, of course, causes the bomoh problems when he's trying to build a business; his magic can attract people's attention but can't keep them for very long if they find they don't like him, and they don't work at all over the Internet, which drastically limits his ability to find clients.
• Persona Non Grata: The bomoh's imam bars him from attending the mosque after he refuses to stop performing evil magic. Ismael bars him from his martial arts school for the same reason.
• Pride: The bomoh thinks himself superior to everyone around him, even the non-magical members of his family and the extremely powerful jinn he summons. This causes him various problems.
  • He first summons a jinn to show off to a couple of classmates who doubted that he really had powers. He almost loses control of the summoning and later finds himself haunted by a ghost which his father has to help banish.
  • At the midpoint of the story, the bomoh's parents lose hundreds of thousands of dollars following the collapse of a real estate firm and the Lehman Brothers' firm, both of which they'd invested in. The bomoh resolves not to make any investments himself and instead rely upon his magic to get money. But later, once he's grown even more arrogant, he decides he's smart enough to begin investing in cryptocurrencies. Unsurprisingly, he's unable to time the market (even with magic) and ultimately loses everything.
  • Similarly, when he gets desperate for money he decides he'll just start self-publishing books on Amazon because he thinks that's an easy way to make a mint. The process takes him much longer than he'd expected, and even when he's done, nobody buys his books.
  • The bomoh becomes so convinced of his own superiority that he attacks the rival magician at the reservoir even after that magician demonstrated incredible magical power. The other magician proceeds to give him a brutal beatdown.
• Rapid Aging: Even when Ibrahim finally identifies the bomoh, he notes one problem: the bomoh's diary indicates that the man died at the age of thirty-four or so, but his body shows signs of immense aging such as osteoporosis. The implication is that his powers aged him prematurely.
• Redemption Rejection: The bomoh is offered opportunities to leave his dark path and rejoin society, but he rejects them all. Even when his imam offers to have him trained in a useful career (thus solving his main objection that his magic powers are his only way to make a living), he refuses.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Magic comes easily to the bomoh, so he assumes that everything else should be easy too and thus embarks on several different ventures (including investing in crypto and writing novels) which he blithely assumes will make him rich. The other ventures, however, prove to require actual skills which the bomoh never bothers to develop, and they ultimately all fail.
• Sucksessor: The bomoh shows great magical promise and looks as if he may even surpass his father in terms of magical ability. However, while the bomoh's father may indeed be a lesser magician, he's much better at the social and business aspects of being a working magician, which allows him to find clients and support his family for many years. The bomoh, by contrast, has nothing but disdain for non-magical skills, barely pays attention in his business classes, and puts no effort into cultivating a social presence except for whipping up a few charisma charms. The bomoh thus proves incapable of carrying on the family business because he can't attract clients.
• Supernatural Martial Arts: The silat tradition learned by the bomoh includes components which focus on building up spiritual energy.
• Turned Against Their Masters: There's an extremely powerful (and extremely dangerous) jinn whom the bomoh's family enslaved long ago, with the bomoh's grandfather passing the jinn down to the bomoh's father and the father then passing him down to the bomoh. In desperation after losing everything, the bomoh decides to summon this jinn and have him kill the magician whom he blames for his misfortune. His diaries abruptly end at that point, with the clear implication he lost control of the jinn and it killed him.
• Weeaboo: The bomoh becomes addicted to eroge, porn games from Japan.