Here's an excerpt.
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.
Salot
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 safeties 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 off 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.
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