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Demons of the New Year (for mature audiences only), the entirely free, entirely online horror anthology from Estranghero Press edited by Karl De Mesa and Joey Nacino is worth perusing just to get a taste of a different kind of horror. These are not the kind of stories where you take a bunch of “good people” (pure-hearted, or at least innocent people), pit them against the forces of darkness (the “demons”) and then count on the light of day to save them in the end.
Instead, the anthology (which features short stories, a comic and a hypertext fiction piece) comes with a variety of perspectives on ‘demons’, tackling the idea in a multitude of twisted, sometimes subversive ways. We’re familiar enough with the faces of the demonic – we know them as ghosts, or aswangs, or those creatures that crawl out of Biblical Hell. But the stories show demons don’t just belong to the night – they’re hiding behind religious icons, or at desks in multi-national corporations, or in karaoke bars, or in the walls of old buildings, or old cities. More importantly, they aren’t the kind of demons one can exorcise with prayers and good intentions.
Many of the stories are long (like sitting still for a while to read the whole thing kind of long), but each presents an interesting enough premise to draw the reader in. Some hark back to the foundations of horror stories – to urban legends and folklore, while others create their own strange worlds.
While all the stories are interesting however, few of them are actually ‘scary.’ Some opt for drama, while others are actually funny rather than creepy. So if you’re looking for the sort of read that will keep you up in fear of ghosties tugging your toes in the middle of the night, you’ll have to keep to just a few of the stories in the anthology.
On the other hand, the collection offers plenty of ideas to chew on, and although these might not keep you up at night, they’re the sort that will peer over your shoulder every now and then, and follow you around throughout the day, darkening your perspective of the world just a little bit – which is really what horror stories are supposed to do.
As de Mesa says in his introduction, “This e-book is our attempt to bring you the beauty of a mind full of scorpions from as wide a net as possible. Going south of heaven should at least be entertaining.”
The Magdalene Fist: Search for the First Edition (Images are NSFW)
Karl De Mesa and Gani Simpliciano
This five-page comic opens the collection, featuring the exploits (or rather the beginning of what will soon be an exploit) of Magdalena, a woman referred to as the ‘witch finder, dragon slayer, fist of angels’. As far as I could tell, Magdalena is a lady exorcist, much like Alexandra Trese except less noble and more violent (which means to say she isn’t Trese at all).
The smoky quality of the art brings out the grittiness of Magdalena’s world, which includes junkies and whores in addition to a missing grimoire and an evil spirit that just might be a tiyanak.
On the other hand, the arrangement of the panels are sometimes a bit confusing, particularly in page 4 where the exposition of Magdalena’s previous encounter with the drug lord she meets up with and the current mission she’s on overlaps, so I had to read the page twice over to get both yarns straight.
Despite this, there’s enough of a story in those few pages to make one wonder what will happen next, and specifically what a character as seemingly cold and brutal as Magdalena will do to achieve her ends.
‘The Kambubulag’ is the urban legend-type horror story updated for the digital age – instead of the two main characters finding out about the legend of Kambubulag road from hearsay, or from your token old wise man / woman, they read about in on Wikipedia.
This actually made me wonder if there really is a road called Kambubulag up north where mysterious accidents happen, which may or may not be related to the moth species it’s named after (but this is the mark of a good urban legend, whether one from the real world or one that just rises up from the fabric of a story – it’s difficult to tell what part of the legend is fact or fiction).
The characters come to find that not only does a connection exist, but that they themselves are more closely involved in the tale then they would like.
Although the story itself suffers from lackluster narration, it still generates a few chills, especially for those with an aversion to creepy crawlies.
For instance, there’s this piece of dialogue from a conversation between the two main characters (which also tells a lot about what they encounter throughout the course of the story): “No, I swear the worm came from inside my head. I must have a lot of parasites in my stomach. And because they didn’t have any more food they crawled all the way up to my brain. I need to take these tablets as prescribed so I can get rid of them…Otherwise, they’ll eat my brain.”
Impressions on the remaining stories will come in part two.
[Image source: Estranghero Press. Copyright holder/s maintain appropriate rights.]
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