The Confinement House (Paperback)

At 3:33 a.m., a fetal monitor begins to sing.

Maternity nurse Nadia Rahim knows how to handle fear. She knows how to read a trace, time a contraction, and check for bleeding before panic can become diagnosis. But when a patient hears a woman singing through the monitor, and the machine briefly shows a second, adult heartbeat, Nadia can no longer pretend every horror has a clinical name.

Then her sister Mira calls.

Mira is thirty-three weeks pregnant and living in Block 13, the HDB estate where their mother vanished decades ago. She has seen a woman beneath her window. A woman in white, with long wet hair, standing nine floors below and smiling up at her.

The signs spread. Black fluid leaks from Mira's body. A neighbour bleeds in the lift. The block opens onto a floor that should not exist.

Then Mira's ultrasound shows something curled behind the baby.

Nadia's search leads her through old hospital records, sealed complaints, and the stories her neighbours have spent years refusing to tell. Beneath Block 13 is a buried name, a sealed wrong, and a Pontianak bound into the foundations.

The dead women inside her want to be witnessed.

The living women above her are still being managed, dismissed, and prepared.

Mira is not the first.

Nadia will make sure she is the last.

The Confinement House is a brutal, atmospheric Singaporean folk-horror novel about pregnancy, medical disbelief, sisterhood, and the terrible cost of not believing women while they are still alive.

Li Mei Tan is a Malaysian-Chinese writer based in Singapore. She specializes in Southeast Asian folk horror, weaving supernatural dread with family secrets, cultural memory, and the terrors hidden inside ordinary homes.