ps_stillreading's reviews
204 reviews

 The Virgin Suicides is an atmospheric book filled with images of longing, death, and decay. But it also has slivers of “the effluvia of so many young girls becoming women together in the same cramped space.” And, of course, it also offers sparks from the short lives of the Lisbon girls in the very few moments we get to hear directly from them.

You see, the book centers around the Lisbon girls, but they don’t feel like the main characters of the story at all.

The story is told from the perspective of the neighborhood boys who don’t actually know the girls. But they want to, and they think they can come close to understanding these girls. But they really can’t. They tell us their fantasies, the lives of the girls as they imagine them to be, and their skewed interpretations of the girls’ actions. The boys also present us with information from interviews of people from their neighborhood in their attempt to piece together the enigma that is the Lisbon sisters and their suicides. 

But the fact is, no one bothered to truly get to know the five sisters. So often, people see them as one big blonde being with five heads and multiple arms and legs. They were never viewed as individuals. They were always lumped together as if they didn’t have their own identity. So much so that when the neighborhood boys are invited into the Lisbon home for a chaperoned party, they are surprised to see the differences between the sisters and to discover their individual personalities. 

In the end, we don’t get to know the Lisbon sisters either. Because they don’t get to tell their own story. Alive, they were ogled at from a distance, isolated as they were by their circumstances. And their deaths took on a mythical quality, a sign of the changing times that the adults say they were fortunate to escape. 

And all we are left with are the boys who want so badly to be part of the Lisbon sisters’ story, that even years later they see themselves as failed heroes who were unable to save the girls. This is a story about the girls, but in telling it, the boys sadly made it about them. 

 It was interesting to read about Mayan gods for a change. There were many soft moments between the two main characters. But the writing style was not really for me. And for some reason I felt like the stakes weren't as high as I wanted them to be? It was like...there wasn't much of a challenge for Hun-Kame. 

 Bayan ng Mga Bangkay is a collection of 10 short stories exploring crime and horror in the modern day. Each story has a supernatural element, and I enjoyed how the different stories are interconnected a la "Love, Actually" or "Valentine's Day" where main characters from one story are featured as background characters in another story, or the stories are connected by a location, a cheap motel, or the presence of a flying aswang 😉 Each story also has gay or queer main characters, a detail I definitely want to highlight.

In each story, you will also feel this undercurrent of frustration and sometimes resignation at the state of society and the government. Each story has a little political commentary sprinkled in, functioning both as insight into the main character and as a commentary on Philippine society today. In Bayan ng Mga Bangkay, you will find characters who are highly cautious surrounding men on motorcycles, who feel the lack of job security, who trade in their morals for a good paycheck, characters traumatized by violence, blinded by hatred, or at odds with how the government is handling everything. This isn't the main point of the stories, but it's there. Honestly, I'm surprised I missed some of this the first time.

Supernatural and everyday horrors are both present in each story. Creatures and tropes familiar to us in Philippine folklore and pop culture mix in with the state of our country in recent years. The result is a book that I feel a lot of Filipinos will understand and relate to. There's just something about reading a book about your culture that helps you connect with the work on a deeper level. Bayan ng Mga Bangkay is not only an entertaining collection of short stories, it is also an engaging book that invites you to think.

 Quick reviews for each story in the collection
1.  Sasaeng, 5 - Jed, a job-hunting fresh grad meets a guy on a dating app. They meet, but Jed realizes the man he just met is hiding something. This story made my heart race. The mood shifts, the slow creeping suspicion that something is wrong, the rush of getting away only to be faced with a different horror. A great story to open the collection  

2.  Matandang Binata, 4 - Rhey, an elderly man, lives with his nephew's family, helping around the house and taking care of his grandniece. One day, Rhey realizes he is being haunted by his partner. An exploration of identity, love, and loneliness.

3. Aswang as You Love Me 5 - An aswang (human-eating monster) uses dating apps to find his next meal, but finds love instead. This is my favorite story in the collection! Super fun to read, even better when read out loud. The theater kid in me really wants to adapt this into a play.

 4. Puno ng Luha 3.5 - Jonas believes that a tree in his backyard weeps sap when a drug addict is killed in their neighborhood. This was a difficult read. Jonas never healed from the violent deaths of his parents, and that shaped his views on extrajudicial killings. "...king hindi bangkay ng kriminal ang nada daan, bangkay ng ordinaryo at inosenteng tao. Kailangan pa bang mamili?"

5. Room 202, 3.5 - Santi is a hitman, familiar to Filipinos as "mga riding in tandem." Cutting between present day and Santi's childhood, we get to know why he seems to he comfortable in being a hitman. Seeing Santi be unfazed by violence and blood, even from a young age, was chilling. He also perceives himself as just a small man trying to survive in a messed up world. "Mga pulis ang madalas na contact ni Bruno [Santi's handler], pero mga pulis na tamad o masyado nang mataas ang posisyon. Ayaw marumihan ang kamay. Kaya kami na lang."

6. Ang Pusang Itim, 4 - As a child, Gabriel dreamt of being a cat to escape his abusive home. Years later, he hears the violence in the home of his new neighbors: a married couple with thheir young son. Then, a black cat starts visiting Gabriel every night. I love that this story leaned into magical realism. But the story also deals with heavy topics of violence and abuse in the home which made my heart ache.

7. Gardo, 4 - A man enters into a relationship with Gardo, a security guard at Lovelies Motel. Gardo is full of horror stories, sharing eveything he heard about the horrors that went on at the motel. This is a romance with a side of horror and a dash of comedy! Reminded me of the "True Philippine Ghost Stories" books (remember those?)

8. Lockdown, 3 - Rick is working from home during the lockdown. Before doing night shift work on his laptop, he likes to look into his neighbors' windows using his binoculars. While looking into his favorite window, he believes he witnesses a crime. So he takes matters into his own hands. This is the longest story, and it was kinda tedious to read. Loneliness and being stuck inside really did number on Rick. His night takes an unexpected turn!!!

9. Bigote, 3.5 - Gary can't bring himself to come out to his parents. But every night, he smokes cigarettes outside his house at the same time as his neighbor from across the road. They acknowledge each other but say nothing, landian from a distance. "Alam ni Gary, marami na ang nagbago sa sitwasyon ng mga bakla. Pero parang ganoon pa rin. Heto nga ang paborito niyang BL, tinatangkilik ng marami, pero heto rin siya, hindi pa rin makaamin sa mga magulang niya." 

 10. Bayan ng Mga Bangkay, 5 - Philippines, 10 years post zombie virus outbreak. All dead bodies are to be given to hospitals, since 6 hours after death, a body transforms into a zombie. Gabriel and his partner Teddy are discussing whether Teddy should go to the hospital to have his tumor treated. Gabriel vows to sneak Teddy out of the hospital in case he dies--a dangerous thing to do since a task force was created to shoot all zombies and any person caught helping them. 
This final story is the most political in the collection. There is a lot to unpack here, especially as an allegory for the drug war. "Pero sa panahon kung kailan nag-iba na ang kahulugan ng 'overpopulation' at 'mortality rate'...'extrajudicial killings'...at ng 'human rights' mismo...ang naging tugon lang ng gobyerno ay pagdedeklara ng Martial Law. Sa ilalim ng Martial Law, ang sinumang kumontra sa paraan ng pagdidispatsa ng gobyerno sa mga zombie ay magiging zombie ng wala sa oras" 

I found myself in the mood for a quiet book. A book to read and keep me company in the solitude of the late night hours when everyone else was asleep. Something that would also invite moments of reflection and wonder.

Glenn Diaz’s When the World Ended I Was Thinking About the Forest was the perfect book for the reading mood I was in.  In a series of essays, Diaz wrote about forests as they show up in fiction, history, and his personal life, and how forests (and their absence) can reshape the world and our understanding of it. 

I grew up and lived in cities my whole life, and I have no deep connection to the forest. But trees, when I do see them in my city-bound life, have always fascinated me. Reading about forests in this book, and how they show up in various works of fiction means that the wonder surrounding trees and forests is one that has been around for a long time and shared by many people across time and space. Reading about the role of forests in Philippine history–how it was seen as a mystical and sacred place, then became a refuge for guerillas during the fight for independence, and finally commodified into products that signal capitalist progress for a young country that has endured so many colonial masters–made me wonder how the state of forests can change where the country might be today.

  

The area where I live has many trees, not quite a forest, but at least it’s something. However, there are no trees on my street, and each time I go out I feel their absence like the space in your gums where a tooth used to be. Something should be there, but it’s not. 

When the World Ended I Was Thinking About the Forest changed the way I look at the world. Isn’t it amazing when books do that? I find myself thinking about this book months after I’ve finished reading it. It has changed the way I think about the forest, trees, nature, and often unseen relationships between human society and the natural world. It is a change I welcome, because, to borrow Diaz’s words, unfortunately "I have not been to a forest. This appears to be at the heart of this inquiry. I have not been to a forest."