Daphne Fama was born in the American South, embedded in its tight-knit Filipino community. When she’s not writing stories about monsters and the women who love them, she’s writing about video games. And when she’s not writing, she’s spending every minute adoring her partner and pup.
The culture and folklore of the Philippines is the soul of House of Monstrous Women. To make sure that I did it justice, I used everything I could get my hands on. Memories and family stories, a lifelong fascination with traditional witchcraft, dozens of articles and research papers. In doing so, I found that I both understood and appreciated my family in a way I hadn’t before.
My first memories of the Philippines were in 1999, when I attended my aunt’s funeral in Carigara. My aunt was young, only 21, and she’d died of pneumonia. During her wake, her body was kept in the living room and the house was perpetually full of people. Her death sent a shockwave through my family. She and my grandmother had parted on bad terms. My grandmother couldn’t seem to accept that her youngest was dead. My mother carried the guilt of leaving her sister behind to go to America. My grandfather sunk a little deeper into the bottle.
I’ve been to the Philippines countless times since then and the tiny town of Carigara has grown into a bustling city. The family house has gone from candles to electricity in every room, complete with air conditioner. But that snapshot of Carigara in 1999, that moment of grief, is what I drew from for House of Monstrous Women.
The complicated family dynamics, the power plays, the expectations and broken hearts of my family were also major inspirations for the characters. My mother and my grandmother were both pushed into marriages early, whether they wanted to or not. My mother’s friend was essentially “bought” by an older man when she was just in high school. And I felt the same pressure to marry, even though I was questioning whether I was attracted to men at all.
I felt the all-too-common pressure to get a high-paying job and uplift our family from poverty. At eight, I was given two options: lawyer or doctor. My grades in math were abysmal, so I became the former, though I hated it. My mother had it worse, though. She’d been sent off to be a live-in servant in Manila at sixteen and bounced between houses before a long stint of homelessness made her parents call her back. This is one of the uglier parts of the culture that no one wants to acknowledge. The sacrifice of self for the betterment of the whole. It’s this cultural pressure that inspires many of the actions of the main cast.
The Ranoco house is influenced by so many things. I used Biliran, a nearby island, as the base. I’d visited the area a few times over the years as a volunteer for my mother’s medical mission, and I’d seen just how rural and far out of the way some of these communities could be. The sound of insects was omnipresent, and the trees leaned close to nipa houses, as if nature was always on the cusp of reclaiming everything. This became the thick jungle that cut off the Ranoco house from the world.
For the house itself, I had a Frankenstein of a vision. I took the crumbling Spanish-style homes you see in any town in the Philippines. Almost always, there’s some type of ghost story associated with them. Some were makeshift prisons during the Japanese invasion, others were hospitals. With their multi-generational architecture and dark wood in mind, I added influence from the Winchester House and the physics-defying home in the House of Leaves. Both locations are labyrinths that weren’t made for people. Rather, they were a place for something to hunt and for the hunted to hide.
Then came the folklore. I grew up with stories about aswang, which seem to vary from region to region. In Carigara, aswang live in families, with only one member being possessed with an intense and hellish hunger. At night, the aswang would leave their home and hunt for something to eat. An unborn baby, a woman walking alone at night, a recently buried corpse. To facilitate that hunt, they could change shape. Black cats or dogs, large birds that flew at night. Because there was no way to tell them apart from a normal human during the day, families that were believed to be aswang were ostracized.
A family we’re still friends with were reputed to be aswang. The rumors and accusations became so nasty that the family fled Carigara. The daughters, who inspired the Ranoco sisters, have changed their names since then and are living normal lives. For a while I lived just an hour away from them, and we went to their house for Thanksgiving. Babies weren’t anywhere on the menu, in case you were wondering.
But aswang were just the start. It’d be an understatement to say I adore Filipino folklore. But a long history of colonization means that so much of it has been lost and continues to be lost as the years pass. I drew from childhood stories of balete trees, books written decades ago, and from in-person interviews. It’s the latter that I had the most fun with. Through the hard efforts of my aunt, I was able to visit and talk to a sorcerer who practiced black magic.
This sorcerer made a deal with an Engkanto, a spirit, for power in exchange for the lives of his family. It was a deal he didn’t understand the full ramifications of until it was too late. But after that, he was capable of both blessing and hurting anyone he pleased. He boasted he could kill anyone, anywhere, so long as he had a picture and had been given the right price. This sorcerer and the bargain he made were a huge inspiration for the twisted deal in House of Monstrous Women.
I poured so much of myself, my family, and my culture into the pages of House of Monstrous Women. It took a lot of legwork, conversations, and a few tears to get it to where it is today. And I couldn’t be happier to see it go out into the world.
House of Monstrous Women by Daphne Fama
Recently orphaned due to a political tragedy, Josephine is taking care of the family home while her brother is away. So when her childhood friend Hiraya offers an escape from the empty house to play games, Josephine agrees. But there are dark rumors about Hiraya’s family and their strange house, and as the game progresses, Josephine realizes that those rumors might not be hearsay after all. Winning the game is the only way to survive, but victory is impossible without bloodshed…
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