“A god lives in this house.”

ASCENSION is a novel with such a strong sense of time, people, and place, it feels almost real. A word of caution: Drinking your pumpkin spice latte while reading Eliza Victoria’s latest novel might not be the best idea. You might end up spilling it out of sheer fright, as the author brings us to a very scary place that Filipino readers will recognize all too readily: the neighborhood haunted house.

This latest novel by award-winning author Eliza Victoria revisits themes present in her previous books Wounded Little Gods (where gods walk among us) and Dwellers (leaving behind one’s real life by jumping to another).

In Eliza Victoria’s book, she plays upon the animistic belief that still holds sway despite centuries of religious conversion and modernity: that the land has deities who require blood sacrifice in order to be appeased. Such a god inhabits the haunted house in Santa Clara, Bulacan, and has lived on the land since long before the building’s construction.

In chapters that jump from past and present, Eliza paints a horrible picture of a country where innocent civilians vanish and are found as corpses floating in the river, where red-tagging means doom and everyone wishes to “escape the narrative.” The sense of suffocation is intense, perhaps all the more so for this Filipino reader. More than a geographic place, she also accurately paints emotional landscapes of familial abuse or neglect, and overall, a sense of hopelessness in what she describes as a broken system. One that her characters will do anything to escape from.

Haunted houses in horror stories are nothing new, but what Victoria brings to her rendition is locating it in a future OFW’s psyche. The desire to escape and live an alternative life, in a brighter place, in a safer world, is what fuels this story and its protagonists to do what they need to do, in order to bring about that Instagram-perfect life of comfort, travel, and leisure.

What sacrifices must be made for these dreams to become reality?

I thought the strongest parts of the book were its beginning and Victoria’s lyrical writing, but the narrative thread somehow became looser in the middle, with an ending that will please those who like theirs bleak and black. Here is a Bulacan people will do anything to leave. And while her atmospheric and evocative writing adds to the overall effect of revulsion and chilling despair, this reader kept waiting for a pay-off that, when it came, turned out to be twisted in such a subversive way, that shook me to the core and haunts me two days later.

True horror lies not in the supernatural, but in the true-to-life characterization of what people are capable of. And Victoria highlights the worst of what lies inside us. She adds a dash of philosophy as she writes about moral good. “Are we truly good, or are we just lucky?” she asks, making us ponder if our so-called virtue is indeed chosen with kind intent, or if it is nothing more than mere fate. Her characters do terrible things, but she seems to say, it’s because they were forced to do so. Ethical philosophy aside, the heinous acts in the book remain. Victoria set out to write a horror book, and indeed left this reader truly horrified at its end.

“If the police didn’t use violence, if the world was just and kind,” muses one of her characters. If we lived in a different Philippines, perhaps Victoria would have written a different book. But we don’t, and so she wrote this one.

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[The writer received an ARC of Ascension. It is available for pre-order for P745.00 from National Bookstore]

ABOUT THE REVIEWER:

Gabi Francisco is a classically trained soprano who now performs in the English / Music / Drama classroom. On weekends she soaks in as much art and literature as she can, so she can pass her love for the arts on to her students. She passionately believes in the transformative role of arts education in nation-building. (IG: teacher.gabi.reads )