"All those girls/who wore the red shoes/each boarded a train that would not stop," reads the poem The Red Shoes by Anne Sexton. "Stations flew by like suitors and would not stop." Good girls go to heaven, but bad girls go wandering.
In Indonesian author Intan Paramaditha's debut novel, The Wandering, the narrator puts on a pair of magical red shoes gifted by the Devil, which lets the wearer wander the world - but will not let her stop.
This is a choose-your-own adventure novel told in the second person. The choices the reader makes from page to page dictate where the narrator ends up, be it a cemetery in Berlin, the red-light district of Amsterdam, the Tijuana border or somewhere else.
It took Paramaditha, 40, nine years and a large map to write the novel, which has 15 different endings.
"When you travel or go on a journey, you always ask yourself: What if I had taken that path and not this path?" she says over Skype from Sydney, where she lectures on media and film studies at Macquarie University.
"The novel lays out parallel realities where you can see different versions of yourself making decisions.
"It gives the sense of freedom, but you're not really free - all these options have been made for you by the author.
"It's the same thing when we travel. Our options are already predetermined by certain structures such as class, nationality, passport and whether you are travelling as a woman or a man."
The book takes its structure from the Choose Your Own Adventure children's gamebooks popular in the 1980s and 1990s, but is very much an adult novel.
The narrator begins as a bored young woman in Jakarta who starts a demonic love affair and is given a pair of red shoes to fulfil her wanderlust.
Later in New York, she winds up in a taxi en route to the airport, but loses a shoe and is given three choices: stay and explore the city, make a police report or continue on to Berlin.
The storylines straddle a variety of genres, such as Gothic horror, a noirish riff on Alfred Hitchcock's thriller Vertigo and a dive into the history of communism in Indonesia.
The Wandering was first published in Indonesian in 2017 under the title Gentayangan, and has just been published in an English translation by Stephen Epstein.
Gentayangan, says Paramaditha, means "wandering" in Indonesian, but refers to the state of spirits trapped in limbo between the worlds of the living and the dead.
Like her narrator, Paramaditha grew up in Jakarta. "My parents would buy me books, but they couldn't afford to go abroad. My friends all went wherever they wanted for holidays, and I couldn't even go to Singapore."
She made her own way overseas by winning a Fulbright Scholarship to do her master's degree in San Diego, then another scholarship for a PhD in New York.
She has also lived in Amsterdam and is now based in Sydney with her partner and daughter.
"There's a certain feeling where you feel like you are in between," she says.
"I think this is something a lot of migrants experience and also people who are on the move - international students, those in diaspora, refugees. I wanted to talk about this liminal state."
Interspersed between the jetsetting adventures of The Wandering are fairy tales and horror stories, from the Indonesian folk tale of the unfilial sailor Malin Kundang to Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen's The Red Shoes, in which a girl dons a pair of cursed shoes that will not let her stop dancing until she cuts off her feet.
Paramaditha - who counts Mary Shelley, Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood among her influences - is fascinated by horror and how it intersects with feminism.
She explores this in the subversive tales of her 2018 story collection, Apple And Knife, which was also translated into English by Epstein.
Paramaditha's mother, who told her stories as a child and bought her a typewriter on which to compose her own, died of a brain tumour last year before she got the chance to read The Wandering in full, though she loved Apple And Knife.
"She understood that (Apple And Knife) was really based on her, because she was a rebel," says Paramaditha. "It started when I was really young and I didn't understand why she was so weird. She did a lot of what you could say were monstrous things."
Once, her mother smashed a plate in the kitchen sink and began to wail. Then she went missing for a few months without explanation. "I was so afraid," recalls Paramaditha.
"Now I understand, as an adult, that it was a very difficult time for her and that was how she negotiated with the patriarchal structure around her that pushed her to be a good woman, a good mother. She couldn't escape and this was her way of resisting."
Now, Paramaditha lets the women in her writing wander where her mother could not.
"I want to talk about Indonesian women and how they resist the confines of patriarchy," she says.
"Sometimes, you don't have many options to resist, so you have to resort to monstrous acts."
• The Wandering ($26.95) is available at bit.ly/TheW_IP. Apple And Knife ($18.95) is available at bit.ly/AppleK_IP
