This article examines Beth Yahp’s novel The Crocodile Fury (1992) to explore how the novel’s fusion of conventions of the literary gothic and elements from indigenous folklore respond to the conditions of gendered and colonised oppression in the marginalised subject. By situating the many iterations of the titular “crocodile” as a quasi-mythic animal in Malay lore against the three major instances of physical transformations from the human to the grotesque non-human in the narrative, this article seeks to analyse how such transformations participate in a dialectic of oppression and liberation for such marginalised characters. At the same time, it explores how the multiplicity of interpretative possibilities in the novel open up the space for the subjugated female characters such as the lover and the young narrator to resist being appropriated within a critical framework that locates their agencies in the binaries of their victimhood and rebellion alone.