The Philippine Online Chronicles

This is the second part of our interview with Karl De Mesa (Trust Your Black Shirt), editor (of Playboy Philippines, and several anthologies), journalist and horror writer. He recently co-edited the horror anthology Demons of the New Year from Estranghero Press (reviewed here and here), and has a collection of novellas entitled book "News of the Shaman" coming from Visprint Enterprises. He is a part of several bands: a post rock group (Biscochong Halimaw), a stoner metal group (Ninja Empire), and a post beat duo (Gonzo Army). In this portion of the interview, De Mesa speaks about his definition of horror, and the state of the genre in the Philippines, as well as tips for young writers.

What's your personal definition for your type of "horror"? It seems to be, in its own way, just as broad as fantasy or science fiction.

Exactly. For me, I've outgrown the "Creature Fights" sort of horror. What I'm going for with my horror is a cross between gothic punk and transgressive literature, the type where characters might reach enlightenment through a  haymaker, or when their legs are cut off at the knee. It's very Sith.

Is it right to say, then, that horror for you is not a shock and gore thing?

Right, it's about confronting taboos, coming face to face with the unarticulated, the places we simply do not want to tread, because of who we believe we are. Take a look at Japanese horror, as one good example: there's this one movie called "Audition" where a woman is slicing up a man using piano wire.

Would you say that it's easier for a visual medium such as film to evoke that sort of disturbing emotion in its horror?

Yes, it is easier, but at the same time, I don't think that film can stimulate the other senses--aside from vision and hearing-- in the same way that fiction can. Good fiction can make you smell something, touch it, taste it…  Only good prose can do that.

What about comics? You did one for Demons of the New Year.

Comics are great, especially if a writer finds an artist like Gani (Gani Simpliciano, who drew De Mesa's The Magdalene Fist: Search for the First Edition) who can execute the images in the story. Gani even slices himself up sometimes to get the red "just right"… so yes, I'm trying to avoid having too much of that color in our future collaborations!

When you're dealing with taboos, with that kind of transgression, you take the reader far beyond their comfort zones. How do you ground them?

You ground them with characters who are real people, with sympathetic concerns and motivations. This is something Philip K. Dick was great at. Even monstrous creatures can have drives that people will understand: hunger, for example, is something we're all familiar with--I used that for my were-dog story in "Tales of Enchantment and Fantasy". Other creatures can be motivated by a need for control, say a Tikbalang in a crime family. The characters can be inhuman, but their motivations can still be human. They may have special needs, but that's still a motivation that can be sympathetic.

I think this is one of the powers of horror: defamiliarization. That can also work to make the central form of a metaphor stronger.

As both a fan and a writer of the horror genre, do you think the genre has changed from when you were growing up?

Quite a bit. The horror stories from the generation of Tony Perez have a different, more cerebral flavor. Now it's changed, but it's changing in different directions, not evolving into just one thing. You can compare my fiction with Yvette Tan's, for example. We started at more or less the same time, with more or less the same concerns, but our perceptions of the world are very different. Let's say the two of us are in Quiapo, I would write about the strange religious elements that are already there, ground level stuff-- she'll use that to create a story like "The Child Abandoned." Maybe it's because I treat fiction writing in much the same way I treat journalism. I spent three years researching the devotion to the Black Nazarene, the matrices of the anting-antings, the herbs, the fortune tellers… I once was part of a documentary team that went all the way to the statue itself. That's the kind of sh*t I like to do.

Do you think more of this type of horror will come out in the future?

Sana! We need more extreme fiction. We're still trapped in the mainstream literature type of mindset, and also too concerned with making our fiction easy to understand, easy to stomach. Unless we're willing to "sniff the guts" so to speak, we won't achieve real horror.

So what advice would you give to someone who wants to write this kind of horror?

If you really want to write horror, and you're just at the beginning of your career, don't "set out" to write horror. The tendency is, you'll come out of the gate with a checklist--kailangan pag horror ganito yan, etc.--and by then you've kind of psyched yourself out. That was the problem with a number of submissions we got for Demons of the New Year. The key is to go beyond what other people are doing, to realize: "Hindi siya bawal." Aim for the visceral, realize that--like Lovecraft--your stories don't necessarily need to make sense for them to horrify.

You mentioned the editing process for Demons of the New Year. What was your criteria for selecting stories? You and co-editor Joseph Nacino seem to have somewhat different tastes.

Yeah I knew that coming in. Joey would focus on the structure of a story, while what drew me in was whether or not the story had a visceral impact on me. Of course we did receive some submissions like that--my favorites from the anthology are "K-10 Mushroom" by Marguerite Alcazaren de Leon and "Best Served Cold" by Rommel Santos. I'm glad we chose to do the anthology, as I see it as a sort of entryway, and proof we can put something like this together without help from "the Elders".

Still, I was expecting a lot more "wasak" from the submissions honestly--I know those writers are out there, writers who write this kind of horror. If you've read the Clive Barker story "In the Hills, the Cities"--a perfect illustration of what the "body politic" is--that's what I mean.

Are there any other stories you could name that had the same effect on you?

A few that I can think of off-hand "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket" by Edgar Allan Poe and the sort of spiritual successor, "At the Mountains of Madness"  by H.P. Lovecraft which sort of set out the Cthulhu mythos.  Also, "Something About a Death, Something About a Fire" by Peter Straub--a really short story, less than ten pages, about a carnival act involving a taxi and a clown… and it left me utterly horrified.

Your new book, "News of the Shaman" is out this week. What's next?

Well, I might take a bit of a break from fiction. It has taken four years to get News of the Shaman out. I was also a bit disillusioned by a recent workshop, and I think I need to think about the direction of my current novel in progress. I am working on a collection of my non-fiction--reportage, essays, and the like--hopefully by next year. As for that novel-in-progress, it will deal with a magician who comes of age and returns to Quiapo--the entire book revolves around Quiapo and a Tikbalang Overlord who rules a local crime family. This is the novel I submitted to the workshop--and no one understood it. Ganoon siya ka-wasak. Still, I was super glad for the opportunity and I loved being in Baguio with the fellows and panelists all the same. it was a great experience. But I'm still deeply committed to exploring our Shamanic tradition.

[Image source: (1) Base from Demons of the New Year. (2) Trust Your Black Shirt. Copyright holder/s maintain appropriate rights.]

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