When I opened Ayesha Muzaffar’s Jinnistan on a sweltering July afternoon, the first story sent a cold shiver up my spine. I felt the kind of fear that was both familiar and inherited; the same fear that once made us huddle with cousins on summer evenings, sipping chai as our grandparents spun tales of jinns under banyan trees and churails who roamed moonlit lanes. In winter, these stories followed us into quilted sleepovers, their shadows lingering long after the laughter had faded. Horror has always been a part of our cultural imagination, alive in our oral traditions, folklore, and family rituals. Yet, unlike in the West, where Gothic literature is celebrated, in Pakistan it remains an unclaimed literary inheritance.
In English literature, the Gothic is a well-established genre studied in universities, critiqued in journals, and immortalised by big names like Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Bram Stoker. These writers used the supernatural not merely to frighten, but to probe societal anxieties: industrial change, moral decay, the boundaries of science, the fragility of human reason. In South Asia, however, despite a rich well of folklore and supernatural belief, Gothic has never been granted the same literary legitimacy. Our jinns, churails, aatma, and haunted havelis are abundant in oral storytelling, but rarely find themselves woven into novels or short stories that receive literary recognition. What exists is scattered and often dismissed as “popular horror”, rather than examined as a form capable of cultural critique and psychological nuance.
Yet, Gothic fiction could serve an urgent cultural role in Pakistan. The genre thrives on what is hidden, forbidden, and unsaid—the very things our society often struggles to confront directly. Behind its haunted corridors and supernatural beings lie metaphors for patriarchy, class oppression, moral policing, and the paranoia of the unseen. In a context where open critique can be risky, the Gothic provides a mask, allowing writers to smuggle uncomfortable truths into stories that appear to be “just” about fear. It also preserves fragments of our oral heritage, reimagining folk tales for modern audiences while giving them psychological depth. By ignoring Gothic as a serious literary form, we risk losing not only a valuable mode of storytelling but also a powerful mirror to our collective anxieties.
In Pakistan’s climate of formal and informal censorship, the Gothic’s subtlety allows it to convey truths that cannot be spoken outright, emerging in whispers rather than shouts
Ayesha Muzaffar’s Jinnistan and Abu’s Jin show what a Pakistani Gothic could be: jinns lurking in the shadows, eerie silences swallowing entire rooms, characters never quite sure what is real. Her claim that the stories are inspired by real encounters, filtered through her father’s work as an exorcist, lends them a strange credibility by blurring the line between fiction and testimony.
The jinns in her tales are not only creatures of folklore; they are embodiments of fear itself: fear of transgressing social boundaries, fear of moral judgement, fear of the unknown that lives within us. By placing these beings in recognisably Pakistani settings like narrow lanes, crumbling houses, and whispers between neighbours, Jinnistan reclaims the Gothic for our own cultural landscape, proving it can be more than imported shadows from the West.
If there is something Pakistanis love more than December shaadis and desi food, it is jinn stories (Ayesha Muzaffar, Jinnistan).
Despite its thematic richness, Gothic fiction here is largely ignored by critics and publishers, often shelved alongside thrillers and commercial horror. This dismissal overlooks the genre’s ability to hold up a mirror to our collective fears. In Pakistan’s climate of formal and informal censorship, the Gothic’s subtlety allows it to convey truths that cannot be spoken outright, emerging in whispers rather than shouts.
It is time to reclaim the Gothic as part of Pakistan’s literary inheritance. Our stories of jinns, churails, and haunted spaces are not just fireside diversions; they are vessels carrying centuries of fear, morality, and cultural memory. Writers like Ayesha Muzaffar have shown that when these tales are treated with craft and intention, they can illuminate the shadows of our social reality as powerfully as any realist novel. Critics, too, must expand their gaze to see beyond the Western canon and recognise the Gothic’s place in our own literary map. Perhaps then we will realise the things that haunt us are not relics of superstition at all, but reflections of ourselves, waiting to be seen in the dim light between fiction and truth.