This is the blog of Ian Rosales Casocot. Filipino writer. Sometime academic. Former backpacker. Twink bait. Hamster lover.
Email: icasocot(at)gmail.com
The Great Little Hunter
Pinspired Philippines, 2022
The Boy The Girl
The Rat The Rabbit
and the Last Magic Days
Chapbook, 2018
Republic of Carnage:
Three Horror Stories
For the Way We Live Now
Chapbook, 2018
Bamboo Girls:
Stories and Poems
From a Forgotten Life
Ateneo de Naga University Press, 2018
Don't Tell Anyone:
Literary Smut
With Shakira Andrea Sison
Pride Press / Anvil Publishing, 2017
Cupful of Anger,
Bottle Full of Smoke:
The Stories of
Jose V. Montebon Jr.
Silliman Writers Series, 2017
First Sight of Snow
and Other Stories
Encounters Chapbook Series
Et Al Books, 2014
Celebration: An Anthology to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop
Sands and Coral, 2011-2013
Silliman University, 2013
Handulantaw: Celebrating 50 Years of Culture and the Arts in Silliman
Tao Foundation and Silliman University Cultural Affairs Committee, 2013
Inday Goes About Her Day
Locsin Books, 2012
Beautiful Accidents: Stories
University of the Philippines Press, 2011
Heartbreak & Magic: Stories of Fantasy and Horror
Anvil, 2011
Old Movies and Other Stories
National Commission for Culture
and the Arts, 2006
FutureShock Prose: An Anthology of Young Writers and New Literatures
Sands and Coral, 2003
Nominated for Best Anthology
2004 National Book Awards
4:10 PM |
Cupcake
Labels: fiction, philippine literature, speculative fiction, writers, writing
1:05 PM |
The Cataloguer of Deceit on Strange Horizons
Labels: fiction, magazines, speculative fiction, writing
7:27 AM |
The Purge
Labels: fiction, history, issues, nazi germany, pink triangle, queer, religion, speculative fiction, world war II
3:43 PM |
Thoughts on Worldling
Labels: fiction, speculative fiction, writing
10:48 PM |
Dark Heart
There is one simple reason why the horror stories of Yvette Tan come off with such a sense of satisfaction, and can be rightly considered as being among the best in the genre: reading her debut collection Waking the Dead and Other Stories [Anvil, 2009], I soon realize that at their darkest hearts, these stories are really all about love and longing. The malevolence at the center of each story can be quite terrifying, but somehow Tan manages to go above the fray of mere horror to underline the human element that is at its core. This is what makes them transcendent. Consider the title story, where a lovelorn man unlocks a secret language that can summon the dead -- all to call from the other realm the woman of his affections. You read on, and you are confronted by a vast variety of horror -- both human and supernatural -- but it all goes back to this: there's one, and there's the other, and there's the longing to connect or to love, but there's the darkness between them that consumes. This is most darkly exploited in "Stella for Star," where a tiyanak story becomes a dark fable of "motherly" love. In "Delivering the Goods," the precise and unfeeling butchering of a young boy for underworld reasons becomes a reflection for connection and fatherhood. In "Kulog," a kapre makes a connection with a little girl, to his own detriment. In "Daddy," a father's ghost phones in, to leave one last bilin. In "Boss, Ex?," a futuristic contraband movie chip becomes a means of dealing with the ghosts of the past, and loves lost. In the end, while you reel from the horror and the graphic details and the sense of dread of many of these stories, you are pulled in by the strange comfort of knowing that what lies beneath them is a pulsing heart -- bloodied and bruised, yes, but alive and filled with aching longing.Labels: books, horror, philippine literature, speculative fiction, writers
12:27 AM |
The Origins of Trese and the Kambals
I like Origins stories. In the tradition of graphic literature (komiks to some of you), they're a staple in the narrative, and most superheroes come barging into our consciousness with an Origin story. There's something about knowing where a hero comes from -- what shaped him to become this something -- that's infinitely intriguing and satisfies a hungry curiosity (we all like asking, "Why?"), and when done right, they provide the meat to the mythos without reducing the hero to a caricature of easy motivations. But that's only one thing that I liked about Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimo's third installation in their Trese series. Mass Murders, which gives us the curious and very supernatural childhood of Tan and Baldisimo's kick-ass titular female detective of the uncanny, also gives us a look into the origins of Alexandra Trese's fast and furious sidekicks -- the Kambals, those mask-wearing half-breeds who do Trese's bidding with fierce loyalty and an extreme taste for blood. (The horror writer Yvette Tan finds them extremely hot -- and so do I.) There's also the graphic violence which not only takes off from the gut-wrenching ballets of Alan Moore and Quentin Tarantino, but also has the glorious roughness and tumble of old Filipino action movies. But what impresses me most about this volume (two other volumes precede this one) is not just Tan's tight narrative and Baldisimo's concisely conceived black and white world, but also in how they dip into local gods and fantastic monsters and assorted lower mythology creatures of the pre-Spanish Filipino netherworld. In a kind of an afterword, Tan writes: "The works of Neil Gaiman was a major influence when it came to writing Trese, most especially Sandman and American Gods. In those stories, he asked the question, 'What happened to the gods of old? Where are they now?' And he showed us a goddess of love who found her worshippers in a strip club, gods of death who now run a funeral parlor, and gods of mischief still up to their old tricks. Which made me ask the question, 'Where are the gods that were once worshipped by Filipinos before the Spaniards came? Have they found a new place in the city of Manila?'" Which is how they have come up, in this volume, with the bloodthirsty god of war, Talagbusao, whose bloody rituals and wishes to permanently wreck havoc in the mortal realm leads to this book's main plot, as well as to the explanation for the Kambal's existence. I admire this organic and pulsing attempt to bring back the ancient myths and subject them to the creativity, darkness, and demands of the modern world. It was indeed Gaiman who once told us -- when he first came up with the Philippine Graphic/Fiction Awards -- that we have a wealth of local legends and lore that are more than ready-made for explorations in local speculative fiction, and Trese is a good example of that. The last time I was this excited over a similar project was Arnold Arre's The Mythology Class. (Similarly, Dean Francis Alfar and the core LitCritters also have a cycle of stories about a land called Hinirang -- and I have long demanded an anthology of such stories, but only the future can tell whether that project comes to fruition.) And yet, despite the horror and fantasy that make stories like this ghettoed into Genreville, you see reflections of real-life issues and conflicts -- the corruption of civil government and military, the salacious criminality of small-town politicians, the clueless desperation of the law, the mud of chaos that has engulfed the country, which can only be explained through the prism of dark enchantment: this is a land bewitched and cursed, and every malevolent detail that erupts in our lives are the secret explosions of aswangs and duendes and the like. That Trese -- both mandirigma and babaylan rolled into one -- is around with the Kambals in tow gives us relief from our ordinary horrors, at least in these pages. I love this book. I bought it today, and consumed it a few hours later in one go. It is simply begging to be made into a very, very good film that does it more than justice.Labels: comics, myths, philippine literature, speculative fiction, writers
1:13 AM |
And the Sixth is Out!
Labels: books, philippine literature, speculative fiction, writers
1:29 AM |
An Anthology of Filipino Fantasy Worlds
What exactly defines a secondary world anyway?
The grandfather of all fantasy, J.R.R. Tolkien, once said the story-maker, as a successful ‘sub-creator’, can make a secondary world in which the reader’s mind can enter. He states, “Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside.” It is this ‘internal consistency of reality’ that is important to make a secondary world work.
Thus, an author creates a story wherein the world imagined in it (but separate from our own reality) must be sound—from its internal laws, principles, etc.—as well as consistent in order to believable. Moreover, this ‘separate’ world combines elements from the ordinary and extraordinary so that readers will be able to find some familiar footing in such an unfamiliar setting.
Given this partial description of what a secondary world is, I then left it to the writer to define the term. And such an interesting set of stories! From a gigantic turtle-like beast traveling in space, to a young woman’s cry for justice in an imagined world, to a witch-queen intent on escaping a deal with a devil, these writers showed how secondary-worlds can be done—with or without the pressure of trying to write a Filipino story.
Labels: books, philippine literature, speculative fiction, web and tech
1:18 PM |
An Alternative History of the Philippines
Labels: history, speculative fiction, writers, writing
10:20 PM |
Call for Submissions to Philippine Speculative Fiction Vol. 5
Labels: books, call for submissions, philippine literature, speculative fiction
12:22 PM |
A Time for Dragons
Labels: books, philippine literature, speculative fiction, writers
