A feminist folk-horror thriller about a monster and a town that can't look away, Iro--"dog" in Bisaya--is ultimately a gripping and astute novel about who sees, who tells, and who controls the narrative.
In the southernmost reaches of the Philippines, a thousand miles from the capital, there is a coastal region known as Davao Occidental. Mostly poor farmers and fisherman inhabit this resource-rich, semi-tropical, and semi-feudal paradise. It is ruled, however, by a powerful dynastic family: the Mallaris.
A series of brutal murders in one of the small, rural towns in the region becomes news, then spectacle, then an occasion for collective hysteria. The victims are all men. The perpetrator, according to reports, is a monstrous female creature. As the killings multiply, Governor Roland Mallari--a man raised on guns, government propaganda, and the hypnotic glow of television--is propelled towards a reckoning. So, too, are the ruling elite of his milieu and the townspeople themselves, forced to confront the vicious power dynamics and cycles of violence that have defined their lives for generations and in which they have been complicit. Marta, Governor Mallari's daughter-in-law and the mayor's wife, is drawn into organizing the community's response, as Roland Mallari's moment of reckoning grows nearer and nearer every day.
Blending horror, mystery, and sharp social critique, Iro is a story about what happens when violence becomes content to be consumed. For readers of Mexican Gothic and Nightbitch, and anyone who's ever doomscrolled a community's unravelling in real time.