Hi everyone! I'm a longtime lurker here and a first-time novelist. My book Severed Blood just went live, and I wanted to share it with the group most likely to appreciate what it's built on.
It's a dark supernatural thriller rooted in aswang and manananggal folklore — the stories our lolas used to scare us with — but reimagined as biology instead of superstition. My protagonist, Marisol Salazar, is a Manila-trained medical laboratory scientist working in Singapore, who spends her nights hunting the syndicate harvesting her own kind for an immortality trade. She's also one of them.
I'm a practicing clinical laboratory scientist myself, so the blood, the marrow, and the lab work are all real. I wanted to write the aswang the way I'd see one under a microscope.
Set between Singapore and Manila. If you like your horror morally grey and your monsters culturally ours, I'd love for you to check it out.
Hi everyone! I'm a longtime lurker here and a first-time novelist. My book Severed Blood just went live, and I wanted to share it with the group most likely to appreciate what it's built on.
It's a dark supernatural thriller rooted in aswang and manananggal folklore — the stories our lolas used to scare us with — but reimagined as biology instead of superstition. My protagonist, Marisol Salazar, is a Manila-trained medical laboratory scientist working in Singapore, who spends her nights hunting the syndicate harvesting her own kind for an immortality trade. She's also one of them.
I'm a practicing clinical laboratory scientist myself, so the blood, the marrow, and the lab work are all real. I wanted to write the aswang the way I'd see one under a microscope.
Set between Singapore and Manila. If you like your horror morally grey and your monsters culturally ours, I'd love for you to check it out.
📖 Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H7W9FWF2
🌐 Website: https://caspianventura.com
📚 Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...
Happy to answer any questions about the folklore research or the writing process. Salamat! 🇵🇭