I am reading Aswangism and thinking that the monsters we know have evolved. They no longer hide under the bed or wait in the balete tree, but have moved into the subdivision, taken jobs, and succumbed to the same wet, sticky existential dread that consumes the rest of us. These creatures don’t scare us because they are other. They scare us because they are tired, they are hungry, and they are indistinguishable from ourselves. 

When I first encountered the concept of the aswang, I was a child who believed fear was a physical location, like a dark room or a thick forest where monsters would eat me alive. I thought they were defined by their separation from humanity. But reading Aswangism, I am struck by the domestication of the grotesque. In the poem “Love Infernal,” demons aren’t tormenting souls in a biblical pit; they are playing in a park. They ride a seesaw made of human bones and swings made of intestines and skin. It is a scene of horrific whimsy, where the infernal entities are merely children on a playground, sliding down the spine of a stegosaurus. Here, the horror is not in the violence, but in the leisure of it. The monsters have evolved from predators into residents. If they live here, eventually, they must find something to do. 

This necessity births a strange new vocation for the monster: they have entered the workforce. The zine operates with a “creative anomaly” that feels like a fever dream of Tacurong where the supernatural has been forced to update its résumé. In “Cooking with Gordon,” the persona parodies the high-pressure environment of a professional kitchen. Here, the monster is not lurking. He is boiling beef and stressing over the lack of garlic, ironically noting that garlic is supposed to kill every aswang in town. He has moved from the simple labor of hunting to the complex art of plating, worrying about Michelin stars while preparing a human for consumption. 

Gilaga ko na ang baka 
Gisunog ko na ang niyog 
Gislays ko na ang mga lamas 
Gitadtad ko na ang tanglad

Noong gipatikim ko na sa kanya 
Sabi niya: 
“This beef is so undercooked, 
It’s starting to eat the fucking salad!” 

This vocation reaches its fever pitch in “Neocristo,” where the labor shifts from the culinary to the messianic. Instead of cooking, he is now auditioning for the role of the savior. He revives Genghis Khan, battles Lucifer, and positions himself as the “messiah ng Zion” to engage in the violent performance of salvation. Here, the monster is no longer the thing that goes bump in the night, but now takes the spirit of a tired shift worker trying to hold the night together while the rest of us sleep. 

Kung kaya mo maglipad, 
Kaya mo maglakad sa tubig, 
Nabuhay ka man gani sa halik ng pag ibig, 
Gi kulata mo ang nakamerkanong kompyuter, 
Namaruan mo si Lucifer, 
Habang gina hila ka ng langit pataas 
Gi pakyuhan mo si Satanas, 
Ikaw ang messiah ng Zion 
hanggang sa huling hininga ipanalangin mo kami

Yet, there is a hollow ring to this divinity. If the monsters are the ones praying for us until their last breath, it implies a spiritual vacuum so vast that only the profane can fill it. For the aswang, the ambition to be god is maybe, just another way to stay busy from the fact that everything is still subject to decay. 

If the monster has evolved to become our savior and our chef, then its philosophy has evolved to reflect our own quiet desperation. As I read deeper, the zine stops trying to scare me with teeth and starts scaring me with the void. In traditional horror, the existential threat is that you might die. In Aswangism, the threat is that you might live, and that living is just a series of wet, sticky, repetitive biological jokes.

Take the poem “Patotin.” It is a nursery rhyme for the nihilist, describing a closed loop of consumption that is as funny as it is nauseating. People eat ducks until their necks explode. They die and are buried. Worms eat the people until the worms get fat and crawl out of the niche. Ducks eat the worms. People eat the ducks. There is no transcendence. There is no stairway to heaven. There is only the food chain, a flat circle of digestion where we are all just protein waiting for our turn to be processed. The horror isn’t the gore, but  the efficiency. It strips away the ego of the human experience and reminds us that, in the end, we are just duck feed.

This biological dread seeps into Seedless, a poem that feels like a panic attack in the produce aisle. G!K lingers on our comfort with seedless grapes, watermelons, and avocados. The preference carries a quiet, almost childlike body horror, a fear that swallowing a seed might let roots break through the body from within. The poem imagines us as “gods” who open wombs and lift out our own beginnings, choosing to be “seedless” in the way we treat our fruit. What rises from the text is a picture of a modern condition shaped by a wish to stay clean and untouched, distant from the thick, fertile earth that keeps calling us back.

This sentiment echoes in Charles Bukowski Visits at 2AM, where the persona suggests that freedom is its own kind of trap. The dialogue moves like a playful declaration of literary mischief. The aswang, much like Bukowski, embraces the ruin that comes with refusing the polished expectations of “high art.” Bukowski scraped poetry clean of its pretensions to show the grime beneath. The aswang makes a similar choice and turns away from the bird, that familiar image of poetic transcendence, and chooses the cage instead. “Masarap man makulong” (It feels good to be imprisoned), the aswang says, because at least the food is free. In the eyes of the aswang, high art and freedom leave you hungry. Sometimes it is easier to eat sardines sautéed in alugbati and keep going. Here, survival is not about discovering some higher purpose. It is about enduring the “lasang lupa” (taste of earth) and waiting for whatever comes next.

And yet, in the face of this inescapable, consuming void, the monster refuses to go quietly. The cynicism breaks, and what spills out is a visceral, bloody longing. The heart of this collection is “Gihanap Kita” (I Looked For You). If the monsters of my childhood were defined by their presence, the monsters of my adulthood are defined by absence. The narrator searches for a lost love with a cannibalistic intensity, slicing open his own flesh to see if the beloved is hiding in the tendons. This is the catharsis of the aswang. The realization that the scariest thing isn’t the monster flying over the roof, but the sheer, unstoppable force of human longing that will tear itself apart looking for something that is already gone.

By the end of the zine, the exhaustion settles in. In Tacurong Hatinggabi, the narrator walks home at midnight, passing ghosts and a man in a barong drinking tuba. The fear has thinned out. The stray dogs no longer chase him and only laugh as he goes by. The shift feels complete. We begin afraid of the monsters under the bed, yet we end up walking beside them on a dark road in Sultan Kudarat, aware that the aswang is not an enemy at all. He is simply another neighbor trying to make it through the night, offering no acknowledgment, not even to the dawn waiting somewhere ahead.

I put down the PDF and realize that the silence is the point. On the Acknowledgements page, the zine affirms this stoicism with a single line: “Wala naga acknowledge ang Aswang” (The Aswang acknowledges nothing). There is no gratitude for institutions, no gesture toward parents. Only a deliberate void. On the copyright page, a final warning breaks that stillness: “Mag lipad ako sa bubong niyo mamayang gabi, kainin ko ang atay ninyo” (I will fly to your roof tonight, I will eat your liver). The tired, hungry neighbor from the beginning is not asking for a cup of sugar. He is looking for a meal.

This closing threat works like a blunt reminder of our own vanity. We spend our days thinking about legacy and seeds and the hope that love might be hiding in unlikely places. In the end, the universe, imagined here as the working-class aswang next door, is simply hungry. And we are simply liver.

This review is part of Mindanews’ literary feature on SOX Zine Fest 2025, focusing on select zines highlighted from the event on November 29, 2025, at Notre Dame of Marbel University, Koronadal City, South Cotabato.