The Dreaming at the Drowned Town follows a haunted Filipino translator whose nightmare-plagued diary unravels a deadly expedition to a newly risen island where history, paranoia, and ancient horrors collide. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

We’ve always been drawn to overlooked corners of Philippine history, especially the transitional period of the 1920s, when cities like Cebu were rapidly modernizing under American rule while remaining at the cultural crossroads that decided the modern Filipino identity–between the legacy of three centuries of Spanish-style hacienda communalism and the enduring influence of the Church, the new American nation envisioned by the suit-wearing, English-nicknamed Sajonistas, and the vision of a country free from both that endured in places like Eastern Visayas. We’ve wanted to write a story in that setting for the longest time, portraying the interaction between people trapped between any of or perhaps none of the paths the Philippines was on the verge of walking, and the conflict that would arise from the clash between their different values and cultural contexts.

The core of the novel, however, came from two major sparks. The first was a love for early 20th-century cosmic horror, particularly the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Kyle has been a devoted fan for years before we ever started writing professionally, and he always wanted to craft a proper homage grounded in our own cultural landscape. The second—and more unexpected—inspiration came from real life. Around the time of the 2024 Manila International Book Fair (MIBF), when we launched our debut novel, Answering the Human Question, Kyle had come up with the concept of a protagonist troubled by vivid and terrible dreams, inspired partly by his own string of nightmares that he had been dealing with at the time through journaling. This entered the story as the main character and narrator of Enrique, who would write about his dreams as Kyle did. It also shaped in some aspects the book’s dream logic–its many false awakenings and the often blurred lines between reality and nightmare.

We also pulled from real historical curiosities like the desolate, sunken town of Pantabangan, the very real Drowned Town that exists here in the Philippines. It’s located in Luzon and in the province of Nueva Ecija, and it resurfaced during the El Niño droughts of both 2020 and 2024. We also combined the aesthetic of that place with Dawahon Islet, which, like the titular Drowned Town, is found near Leyte. Dawahon is a tiny yet densely packed community built on a reef that Kevin often flew over during pilot training. The distant glances and later images of empty, almost liminal spaces in both locations created an uncanny timelessness. It immediately planted in our minds the place where the book’s central mystery would unfold: a drowned town rising again after centuries beneath the sea.

The atmosphere is incredibly vivid. What research or techniques did you use to capture the sensory overload of the island and Enrique’s nightmares?

Much came from layering real-world observation with psychological insight. Research and a little bit of Kevin’s background in biology gave us a foundation for sensory detail—how bodies react to exhaustion, how coastal environments smell, sound, and move. Our travels to parts of the Visayas gave us firsthand experience of environments that feel both crowded and isolated, which helped shape the island’s suffocating atmosphere.

On Kyle’s end, his study of psychology—as well as a few readings of old court decisions for Philippine Law—taught him how perception breaks down under stress. Around the time of MIBF 2024, he was having recurring nightmares, and journaling them became the seed for Enrique’s dream sequences. Those dreams were chaotic, absurd yet vivid, and he translated that rawness into the book’s “dream logic.”

In addition to being partly inspired by Kyle’s own journaling, we employed Enrique’s diary as a framing device. In doing so, we hoped to keep the nightmares disorienting but maintain that they were narratively coherent. The diary form lets us narrow the focus to Enrique’s senses: the heat sticking to his skin, the sulfur that burns the throat, the texture of the drowned town rising from the sea. When those sensory details begin to distort or repeat, the reader feels Enrique’s unraveling in real time.

How did you approach blending real historical tensions of the American-occupied Philippines with cosmic or supernatural horror elements?

We began by grounding the story firmly in Philippine history. The 1920s was a pivotal transitional period in our hometown and province—Cebu was rapidly modernizing under American rule, yet memories of the Philippine-American War and the Revolution before it still lingered. A younger generation of Sajonistas emerged, eager to embrace American culture and modernity, and they often clashed with their elders, who had been shaped by centuries of Spanish influences and even hateful opposition to the betraying, conquering Americans themselves. Naturally, we wanted readers to feel that political and cultural tension in every scene, long before the supernatural appeared.

From there, the horror grew from two sources: Lovecraftian atmosphere and Filipino folklore. Lovecraft shaped the tone and structure—the slow unraveling of sanity, the tension between logic and the unknowable. But we never wanted to imitate Western cosmic horror wholesale. Filipino folklore, possessing tales of otherworldly spirit realms and the phantasms of the restless dead in spades, also played an important role in shaping the story’s identity. In our culture across its history, dreams have often held great power and importance, heralding either auspices of fortune or warnings of a coming malevolence. The sea has long been the place of both the dead as well as the living, and so it seemed natural as well as Filipino for us to portray the water with that same mystic aura.

When these folkloric themes collide with the real political tensions of the American occupation, they amplify each other. The characters themselves reflect this clash–to name a few, the American who believes he brings enlightenment and progress, the Western-educated Filipino guide plagued both by nightmares and generational trauma brought on by war, the old revolutionary who compromises his morals by relying on the wealth of his oppressors, and a corrupt constable armed by the law of a distant empire to fulfill his personal depravities. All of them come together in a chaotic misalliance of pathologies and dysfunctions beneath the cross of a condemned Spanish village, in the caves where the ancestors before told their stories, and above the depths of what came before them all.

Lita’s character goes through some of the most surprising twists. What was your process for constructing her arc?

When we were constructing the original skeleton of the story for Drowned Town, we wanted to explore imperialism—not just as the domination of one country over another, but on a smaller, interpersonal scale through the abuse and conflict that occurs between people. Every character written in this story speaks to or personifies that concept in some way, and Lita began as no different. The age gap between wife and husband, the bursts of passion punctuated by periods of ignorance from one side and betrayal from the other—she represents the country in her own way, a young and beautiful person being taken advantage of by a much older figure. We wanted another victim of imperialism, and in her case, we told the story of a kind of sex tourism and all the sordid perceptions that come with being someone in that world. However, we also wanted her to be aware of that dynamic, so she could play that game and defeat those who would take advantage of her or hold her in low regard. She needed to bear an innate refusal to be victimized, so that by the end she could be the true writer of the story—the architect of her own fate—rather than simply a supporting role in someone else’s narrative. That’s where her most surprising twists come from: the realization that she was never the object of the story, but its author all along.

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