One of the more interesting books I’ve read as part of this site, Marianne Villanueva’s Residents of the Deep is a gripping yet at times unsettling collection of short fiction that moves fluidly between myth and history. It is in short a collection of surreal short stories, anchored in the history of the Philippines yet unafraid to drift into surrealism. The result is a work that feels like a chorus of fractured, forgotten voices.
The opening story, “Dumaguete,” sets the tone by grounding the collection in place with a visit to the aforementioned city. The coastal university town is evoked with almost tactile, at times unpleasant detail, “A sour vomit smell clogged his notrils.” At once affectionate and estranged, the writer admits, “Carlos would often ask himself why his mother and father could not be happy. Or pretend to be happy.” Threaded through this wandering are fragments of a mother-and-son relationship, marked by distance and longing. It is an introduction to Villanueva’s preoccupation with memory as something unstable, always threatened by erasure.
The title story, “Residents of the Deep,” plunges beneath the reader into the voyage of the Cyclops, and makes the ocean the book’s great metaphor. Villanueva writes, “For years we had been hearing tales of a City on the ocean floor, one haunted by people half-God and half-human.” Here, the ocean is both literal and spectral, full of strange creatures but also of drowned voices, possibly the unquiet dead of colonial history. One can never be quite sure if the city is supposed to be real or is a metaphor for something else, and that’s what makes the stories work, a bit like The Life of Pi.
Several of the shortest stories lean further into allegory. “Thing” introduces an unnameable presence: “My name is Darkness. That’s because of the color of my skin. Or maybe it’s because I was born in the year when the nights became longer.” It’s a very interesting story about a Mutant Pig Zoo, but a tad difficult to follow, at least for me. “Spores” is equally engaging to read, but unless I’m being thick perhaps even more difficult to understand, “The boss was born Earthstar. He’d never look her way. His spores were meant to go else: to a Silverleaf. Or a Shag. Not K that smelled like wet rot.” To be frank, I’m not really sure what that means, but again maybe that’s my fault.
Other stories draw explicitly from history, such as, “Don Alfredo & Jose Rizal”, a story about the famous Filipino nationalist and writer whose ideals inspired a revolution. Villanueva’s writing style is highly variable yet always deliberate. In some stories, she uses clipped, declarative sentences, that create an incantatory rhythm. In others, she opens into lush, lyrical description. Villanueva also favours repetition and imagery drawn from water, bodies, and disease, giving the collection coherence even when individual stories at times feel elliptical.
What makes Residents of the Deep special is the way the stories drift between the real and the mythical, carrying the reader across landscapes that feel both familiar and deeply strange. Villanueva allows history and imagination to intermingle so seamlessly that boundaries dissolve, leaving the sense that the past is always pressing against the present. Her prose is lyrical yet sharp, filled with rhythms that echo the ebb and flow of the sea, and it is this fusion of atmosphere and insight that makes the collection linger long after the last page.
If there is a criticism, it is that the collection may have a limited appeal beyond readers already drawn to experimental or allegorical fiction. The fragmented style and shifting voices can feel disorienting, and at times I found some of the stories a bit depressing—but that is more a matter of personal preference than a flaw in the writing itself. Villanueva’s prose is still very competently engineered, and for those willing to embrace it, the effect is both powerful and lasting. Ultimately though, Residents of the Deep is a simultaneously powerful and demanding book. It does not offer easy stories or neat resolutions. Instead, it presents fragments, each one luminous, each one haunted.
Final verdict: Residents of the Deep is a collection that rewards patient readers. For fans of lyrical, allegorical fiction—writers like Italo Calvino, José Saramago, or even Toni Morrison in her more experimental moods, Villanueva’s stories illuminate the fractures of memory and the persistence of voices that refuse to be drowned. At times gripping, at times meditative, it is a haunting, fascinating work that you will either love or hate.
You can get your copy of “Villanueva” here!
