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I've already begun my review (see part 1) of Demons of the New Year (for mature audiences only; NSFW), the entirely free, entirely online horror anthology from Estranghero Press edited by Karl De Mesa and Joey Nacino. As mentioned, the anthology presents a variety of takes on the concept of "demons," and here are my takes on the remaining nine stories. Spoiler warning still applies, so go check the stories out first.
Eliza Victoria
"Salot" brings us to the birthing place of horror stories – the “probinsya.” A good portion of the story involves the main character – a girl from the province about to go to the city for college - going over the horror stories she’s heard from friends and family. These stories are strange little blurbs about sighting apparitions and hearing voices in the night – the kind of stories we’ve all heard before, from maybe a family member or friend, and which more often than not take place outside the "safety" of big cities.
The main character gripes over these stories – they’re part of an absurd, backwards culture she’s ready to ditch. But just as she’s about to leave all those old superstitions behind, the old superstitions (in typical horror story fashion) come to her. This is when the story takes a sharp turn for the unexpected – the salot, the supposed bringers of plague and ill fortune, are not quite what she’s always been told they were, and the way she treats them is far from how other people have.
"Salot" is a sweet read, and the suggestion that the things that go bump in the night might have much more to them than the probinsya-type horror stories suggest, is in itself enough to make it worth reading.
The Different Degrees of Night
Don Jaucian
"The Different Degrees of Night" is a thickly narrated, sensual read. It transports the reader to a mysterious city where shadows run deep and cold and things like comfort or beauty are hard to come by and difficult to keep.
There are two demons here – one is a strange shape-shifting creature which the main character encounters at various points in his life. There’s little that is revealed about this creature, except that it always brings wide-scale disaster and that it seems to be following the main character around – even appearing (possibly) as an attractive human being.
The other demon is the city itself, where the dregs of society seem to gather to die. As the story says, “Every shadow in the city has a name. In every corner, every alley and every murky divehole of this city lives these forsaken beings, whose only meaning of existence rests in their ability to resuscitate the city’s flatlining vitality. It’s not a complicated equation. They live, fend for their lives and the city takes back whatever’s left of them, if they’re lucky enough not to kill themselves.”
This is a story less about the "scary," and more about the feeling of slow decay – something the reader gets to feel every step of the way.
Marguerite Alcazaren de Leon
"K-10 Mushroom" presents some genuinely disturbing scenarios. One might think that no place could possibly be safer (or less likely to hold some horrible secret) than a Catholic all-girls pre-school. But nothing is held sacred here – not childlike innocence, or the nuns who run schools, or the image of the three-o-clock prayer Jesus Christ. And nowhere is safe, even for a young child – there is no hope of comfort from a teacher, or a best friend, or even parents.
Perhaps the scariest thing about the scenarios presented in the story are the glimmers of truth tucked into scenes of children with their eyes gouged out, or people being trapped inside white-washed walls – brainwashing (which, loosely, is what the story is about) may not happen exactly as it does in the story, but it does happen in society, whether through media, or religion, or the discreet covering-up of "what really happened." And as in real life, those who recognize and fight against it are often the first to suffer.
Tyron Caliente
"Dark Moving Houses" takes the idea of "haunted houses" to an entirely new level. It’s not about people going into haunted houses, but the houses themselves getting up and moving around (a joke within the story refers to the idea of “lipat bahay”).
A strong sense of nostalgia pervades the story, which is being told by a man who spent his childhood moving from one house to another. He finds out that houses are not just physical structures people live in – they contain memories, effectively bits and pieces of the people who lived in them. Some of these traces remain long after a person (or maybe the house) has moved on.
Beyond this central concept though, the story gets a bit confusing. Several mysterious personages are introduced (who may or may not have the power to call forth the houses), but why and how remains a point of speculation.
Dominique Gerald F. Cimafranca
This story made me smile. It’s one of the shortest of the stories, comprised of a single scene (starring a personality that should be obvious enough from the title), and it’s about a very particular kind of hell.
There is nothing given by way of backstory or explanation, but sometimes (as exemplified by this story), horror is most effective when it’s simple. All you need is a single scene which starts off relatively simple—or normal, at least—until you get to a sudden chilling twist which shatters all your expectations and leaves you with a disturbing premise to ponder.
Rommel Santos
"Best Served Cold" takes demons, big corporations, and politicians – all one really needs to know of evil – and puts them all together in a creepy (and at the same time funny) read.
The story plays on that old idea of "selling your soul to the devil" (in this case, for revenge). But instead of having to make blood sacrifices to summon demons, all one has to do is go to their office and ask to see the brochure. Damning someone to everlasting fiery torment is pricey, but the hellspawn promise full satisfaction (and get a reasonable commission from it too).
This is one of those stories where the humans are far worse than the devils – after all, the devils are just doing their jobs (and they’re faced with the same kind of worker’s ennui everyday humans are too). It’s human beings who are the voracious consumers of eternal damnation.
Karren Sena
We return to the "haunted school" for "Lullabies," starring a person with a third eye (or perhaps a third ear).
It reads like a classic horror story – phantoms abound (an untold number literally rising from the school walls), and the main character finds herself in that unfortunate situation of being able to see and hear the dead, but being unable to really communicate with them.
Not that she’s never tried. She says, “When I was young I’d try so hard to talk to them, but they would just stare at me, as if everything I wanted to know would be written in their eyes. But no matter how hard I tried, I wouldn’t understand. And they would look at me as if I was The World’s Greatest Failure, and disappear within the walls. I had to face the facts. I was nothing but a helpless freak who can do nothing more but gawk like an idiot.”
Some messy prose hurts the storytelling (and the rather odd insertion of a popular OPM song), but it’s interesting that ghosts are approached not as disembodied specters but as memories, or residual emotions that take on a life of their own.
Carljoe Javier
"Demon Gaga" is a bizarre little tale that melds pop culture references with demonic Lovecraftian goodness. The idea is "what happens if three teenage cousins, for no real reason, just happened to get their hands on the Necronomicon?" The answer, according to the story, is "they would try to summon a Demonic God from Another World, to amuse themselves."
Lady Gaga is involved. Enough said.
Adam David
"Snip" returns to the splattery, visceral side of horror – the title gives enough suggestion of it.
Interestingly, this is one of those stories that can only be read on a computer screen (it’s a hypertext story, which means that the reader has to click on the hyperlinks).
The fact that you cannot get a full picture of the scene until you click on the links is like that moment in a horror movie when you’re waiting for the character to round a corner, or peek under the bed. There’s creepier things waiting to emerge from the dark – and your imagination goes wild imagining its eyes and teeth and claws – but you won’t know exactly what is until you’ve opened the door, or pulled down the bloody sheets.
Once again, the horror anthology Demons of the New Year can be found here.
[Image source: Estranghero Press. Copyright holder/s maintain appropriate rights.]
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