"Never Have I Ever"

Processing my thoughts/feelings for this short story collection, which the author has labelled: gay, Filipino, and horror. I purchased immediately. (The labels check out!)

It's not purely a horror collection but I liked it a lot. Most of the ones I didn't particularly enjoy reading off the bat become creepier and more interesting the more I think about them.

A common theme throughout the anthology is a very palpable and personal anxiety about losing friends to life/situation changes (ie. classroom changes and marriages). I personally had to nope out of all the barkada anxiety. It’s all very real and convincingly all-encompassing but I have no desire to revisit elementary/high school haha

I have complicated feelings about the use of language—I don't really want to get into the particulars here, but as a local who does speak both English and Tagalog, I found some of the choices confusing. Part of it is just that I'm not as used to reading Filipino stories in English. The ones I've encountered in school were written in the 1980s, about serious topics (usually Martial Law-adjacent); set in such distinctive settings, with characters in distinct situations, there was no room or need for Filipino words other than the necessary. I do feel that my language-related preferences are consistent even with fiction (or fanfiction) in Chinese. I just don't like either ambiguity or having to second-guess who the target audience is. (I'd say that target audience for the Filipino stories in Never Have I Ever are local Filipinos. The detail is obviously lived-in, sometimes to the point of being uncomfortable for me because it's all too real.)

I also found some of the stories a little too open-ended and literary(?) for me, but not Kelly Link levels of literary hahaha. I just want easy answers, but this book is not for that. The stories have a lot of structure to them, though.


The stories:
( Read more... )