My upcoming novel, Birthplace, is the first book in a series about werebeasts from Filipino folklore: the aswang. It is also, incidentally, the first book I’ve written that isn’t in the epic fantasy genre…it is paranormal YA. A sort of long, kind of bloody, definitely M-rated paranormal YA.
The working title of this book was “My Anti-Twilight.” I’ll leave it at that. The parallels end there, really. Birthplace is told from the point-of-view of a sarcastic boy called Pablo, whose selfish actions cause a series of misadventures.
I love horror movies. It’s not the scare that draws me in–it’s the creepy, atmospheric storytelling, the best of which mixes human emotions with the supernatural. A great example of this is The Orphanage. It’s not a surprise, then, that my books contain a lot of horror elements–even the epic fantasies.
I’ve tried to incorporate these horror elements to the extreme in The Black Dog series. Growing up in the Philippines means you’re exposed to these types of stories all the time. Although they were told by our elders as a means to control our behaviour, I think they half-believed it, too. For the longest time, I wouldn’t go out in the countryside past sundown. I also looked at people’s eyes all the time, because there was this belief that an aswang’s eyes will reflect your image back as upside-down. Everyone I knew always had a story to tell, either of a personal encounter or a story from a friend of a friend. We even have a relative that some of my family is convinced descended from an aswang, and on special occasions like birthdays or death anniversaries, my family always puts out a hapag, a feast for the spirits to keep us in their goodwill.
The stories in The Black Dog series are about as classic as you can get if you grew up in Filipino society. It’s my love-letter to my culture and to the fact that I believed all that shit. Although, for all you know, maybe I still do…
Pre-order Birthplace and enter the world of the aswangs….
