The Haunting of Tram Car 015 – P. Djèlí Clark

Set in the same world as his short story A Dead Djinn in Cairo, P Djèlí Clark’s novella The Haunting of Tram Car 015 is another slice of alternate-world urban fantasy, full of characterful storytelling and vibrant world building. Agent Hamed Nasr of Cairo’s Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities, along with his younger colleague Agent Onsi, are called to Ramses Station to investigate a haunting in one of the city’s trams. When it transpires that it’s the tram car itself which is haunted, what Hamed assumed was going to be a simple task becomes much more complicated, as the agents attempt to identify the spirit and coax it out of its mechanical host…to varying degrees of success.

This struggle to work out how to get the spirit safely out of the tram forms the main thrust of the plot, with Hamed and Onsi constrained by the Ministry’s scant budget and the difficulty of figuring out what the spirit actually is and why it’s haunting the tram. The two agents are forced to look to some unorthodox methods and accept assistance from unexpected sources, and all the while Hamed is trying to assess his younger colleague’s knowledge and set a good example of Ministry behaviour. Set to the backdrop of a city bustling with the Egyptian suffrage movement building momentum towards a crucial vote, it’s a pacy and entertaining narrative that’s a lot of fun, but also straightforward enough to give Clark a wonderful opportunity to explore some of the contrasting elements of this alternative Egypt.

In this particular fantasy-inflected version of 1912 Cairo, technology coexists with otherworldly spirits, and there’s a real sense of the pace of technology outstripping social change, particularly in the way technological wonders like the trams and the machine-man boilerplate eunuchs are contrasted with the suffragette protests. It’s a theme that was touched upon in A Dead Djinn in Cairo – the idea of a city still adjusting to its relatively newfound modernity – and it’s explored a little more thoroughly here, just from an alternative perspective as Hamed naturally has a different viewpoint to A Dead Djinn’s Fatma. He and Onsi don’t have the boorish comments and attitudes of their colleagues to deal with, and their case (while still dealing with a malicious spirit) is a little more grounded and less spectacular, but through his eyes we see not just the city but also a bit more of the Ministry, what’s involved in its work and how its perceived.

Fatma was such a compelling character that at first it seems a shame for this to not be focused on her once more, however Hamed and Onsi prove fully capable of carrying their own story. It’s becoming increasingly clear that Clark has built something special with this world, and the chance to see more of its everyday nature is welcome indeed, while the different perspective only enhances this. With the focus less on necromancers, ghouls and angels and more on the (relatively) commonplace elements of Cairene life, this builds on the foundations laid in A Dead Djinn and broadens the scope of the setting, maintaining the same evocative tone while reminding the reader that this is a rich, vibrant world with more going on than simply supernatural adventures. Full-length novel A Master of Djinn has a lot to live up to, but on the basis of these first two stories it has the potential to be something very special.

See also: my review of A Dead Djinn in Cairo

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