Ghost of a chance: spooky stories catapult Chinese online-fiction writer to fame
Xu Yunfeng is one of the hottest names in the digital serialisation of fiction – where chapters are posted online under a pay-as-you-read system. And his fans don't like to be kept waiting
After years of writing fiction only for fun while working as an engineer, Xu Yunfeng has finally hit the big time. His latest novel The Great and Most Honourable Master – about warlocks and Taoists throughout Chinese history – is an online sensation, with tens of thousands of people paying to read the latest instalments posted on Ebtang.com. If he gets writer’s block, they get impatient. The pace can be exhausting, but for authors up to the task it's a way to keep demand growing.
It’s an old trick updated for the digital age. Charles Dickens and Alexandre Dumas famously kept their readers in a state of near-constant suspense by breaking their novels into parts and publishing them serially. So too did several writers in the Qing dynasty.
Xu, who writes under the name She Congge, saw 40 million people “click” on his collection of ghost stories set in his hometown – Strange Happenings in Yichang. It became so popular, a print edition followed, selling 100,000 copies. His novel The Other Sea won the World Chinese Science Fiction Association’s Xingyun (Nebula) Award, while another work, The Tomb Robber, was made into a movie. Xu discusses his fictional characters, whether he believes in ghosts and his relationship with an audience always clamouring for more.
How did you become an online fiction writer?
I studied chemical and materials engineering in university and later became an engineer at a construction site in Pakistan. While there, I started to write ghost stories and publish them online in 2010. There are many supernatural folktales, which are passed down by word of mouth, in my hometown of Yichang in Hubei province. I was in Pakistan for nearly two years and spent nine months writing Strange Happenings.
Are you still an engineer?