A Haunting Smile

Bullets are flying in Bangkok. When journalist George Snow's BBC broadcast captures the crack of M-16 fire over Sanam Luang, expatriate writer Robert Tuttle is upcountry, listening in horror. As Bangkok erupts in violence, Tuttle races back to a city on fire — where soldiers turn their guns on civilians, and the air hums with ghosts from every side of Thailand's political divide. In A Haunting Smile, Christopher G. Moore paints an unforgettable portrait of a city—and a generation—on the edge. Through the fragmented voices of short stories, letters, radio reports, and documentary film scripts, he reveals a cast of haunted souls: journalists, arms dealers, drifters, and bar girls caught in a web of moral confusion. At HQ—the legendary Sukhumvit-Road nightspot where angels and devils trade dreams for cash—the living and the dead gather after midnight to barter their desires and bear witness to history's repeating nightmare. Moore's Bangkok noir classic remains one of the few works of fiction to confront the massacre of May 1992, a dark chapter when ordinary citizens faced down tyranny in the streets. Brutal, lyrical, and deeply human, A Haunting Smile is both a ghost story and a moral reckoning for a nation—and a species—forever haunted by its appetite for power.