This article is a study of animals and supernaturalism in the Siri Paiboun crime series, featuring Siri Paiboun, the national coroner of the newly established Lao People’s Democratic Republic. Mainly informed by critical theories of animal studies, the article contends that the animal offers a critical intervention of crime fiction studies. Animals in the series are not just tools or companions to humans, but active agents that, along with preternatural happenings, operate to collapse the distinction between human and non-human animals. Categorised into speaking and gazing animals, fantastic animals, and real and symbolic animals, these animals serve to blur the demarcation line between subjects and objects, physical and spiritual forms, and animals and colonised subjects, respectively. Eventually, the trans-species traffic, witnessed by some of the human characters, results in the de-centring of the anthropomorphic definition of crime. Under supernatural circumstances, animals in this crime series function as a constant reminder that they can suffer like humans, and crime against animals should thus be punishable by law as crime against humans.

Keywords: crime fiction; animal studies; supernaturalism; Colin Cotterill; Siri Paiboun

Agamben, G. (2004). The open: Man and animal (K. Attell, Trans.). Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Arluke, A. & Sanders, C. R. (1996). Regarding animals. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Armstrong, P. (2008). What animals mean in the fiction of modernity. New York: Routledge.

Berger, J. (1992). About looking. New York: Vintage Books.

Black, H. C. (1979). Black’s Law dictionary. St. Paul: West Publishing.

Burdett, J. P. (2003). Bangkok 8. London: Corgi Books.

Burt, J. (2004). Animals in film. London: Reaktion Books.

Calarco, M. (2008). Zoographies: The question of the animal from Heidegger to Derrida. New York: Columbia University Press.

Carstens, D. (2017). Tricksters, animals, new materialities, and indigenous wisdom. In Woodward, W. & McHugh, S. (Eds.). Indigenous creatures, native knowledges,

and the arts: Animal studies in modern worlds. (pp. 93-115). London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Cohen, E. (2003). Animals in medieval perceptions: The image of the ubiquitous other. In Manning, A. & Serpell, J. (Eds.). Animals and human society: Changing

perspectives. (pp. 59-80). London: Routledge.

Cole, L. (2011). Human-animal studies and the eighteenth century. The Eighteenth Century. 52(1), 1-10.

Cole, L. (2019). Imperfect creatures: Vermin, literature, and the sciences of life, 1600-1740. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Cotterill, C. (2004). The coroner’s lunch. New York: Soho Press.

Cotterill, C. (2005). Thirty-three teeth. New York: Soho Press.

Cotterill, C. (2007). Anarchy and old dogs. New York: Soho Press.

Cotterill, C. (2008). Curse of the pogo stick. New York: Soho Press.

Cotterill, C. (2009). The merry misogynist. New York: Soho Press.

Cotterill, C. (2013). The woman who wouldn’t die. New York: Soho Press.

Cotterill, C. (2015). Six and a half deadly sins. New York: Soho Press.

Cotterill, C. (2016). I shot the Buddha. New York: Soho Press.

Cotterill, C. (2018). Don’t eat me. New York: Soho Press.

Cotterill, C. (2019). The second biggest nothing. New York: Soho Press.

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (2007). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Derrida, J. (1978). Writing and difference (A. Bass, Trans.). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Derrida, J. (2008). The animal that therefore I am (D. Wills, Trans.). New York: Fordham University Press.

Descartes, R. (2006). A discourse on the method of correctly conducting one’s reason and seeking truth in the sciences (I. Maclean, Trans.). New York: Oxford

University Press.

Doyle, A. C. (1994). The hound of the Baskervilles. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club.

Eliade, M. (1989). Shamanism: Archaic techniques of ecstasy (W. R. Trask, Trans.). London: Arkana Penguin Books.

Fanon, F. (2004). The wretched of the earth (R. Wilcox, Trans.). New York: Grove Press.

Franklin, A. (1999). Animals and modern cultures: A sociology of human-animal relations in modernity. London: SAGE Publications.

Heidegger, M. (1995). The fundamental concepts of metaphysics: World, finitude, solitude (W. McNeill & N. Walker, Trans.). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Herman, D. (2016). Literature beyond the human. In Herman, D. (Ed.). Creatural fictions: Human-animal relationships in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature.

(pp. 1-15). London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Huggan, G. & Tiffin, H. (2010). Postcolonial ecocriticism: Literature, animals, environment. London: Routledge.

Ivarsson, S. (2008). Creating Laos: The making of a Lao space between Indochina and Siam, 1860-1945. Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Press.

Kalof, L. (2007). Looking at animals in human history. London: Reaktion Books.

Latour, B. (2004). Politics of nature: How to bring the sciences into democracy (C. Porter, Trans.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Lundblad, M. (2009). From animal to animality studies. PMLA. 124(2), 496-502.

McHugh, S. (2009). Literary animal agents. PMLA. 124(2), 487-495.

Ohrem, D. & Calarco, M. (Eds.). (2018). Exploring animal encounters: Philosophical, cultural, and historical perspectives. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Payne, D. G. (2017). Border crossings: Animals, tricksters and shape-shifters in modern Native American fiction. In Woodward, W. & McHugh, S. (Eds.). Indigenous

creatures, native knowledges, and the arts: Animal studies in modern worlds. (pp. 185-204). London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Philo, C. & Wilbert, C. (2000). Animal spaces, beastly places: New geographies of human-animal relations. London: Routledge.

Poe, E. A. (2008). The murders in the rue morgue. In Widger, D. & Traverso, C. (Eds.). The works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume 1. The Project Gutenberg. Retrieved April

, 2021 from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2147/2147-h/2147-h.htm#chap07

Robles, M. O. (2016). Literature and animal studies. London: Routledge.

Rohman, C. (2009). Stalking the subject: Modernism and the animal. New York: Columbia University Press.

Roscher, M. (2017). Animals as signifiers: Re-reading Michel Foucault’s The order of things as a genealogical working tool for historical human-animal studies. In

Ohrem, D. & Bartosch, R. (Eds.). Beyond the human-animal divide: Creaturely lives in literature and culture. (pp. 189-214). London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Simenon, G. (2013). The yellow dog (L. Asher, Trans.). London: Penguin Books.

Stuart-Fox, M. (1997). A history of Laos. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.

Woodward, W. (2017). ‘The only facts are supernatural ones’: Dreaming animals and trauma in some contemporary southern African texts. In Woodward, W. &

McHugh, S. (Eds.). Indigenous creatures, native knowledges, and the arts: Animal studies in modern worlds. (pp. 231-248). London: Palgrave Macmillan.