There is a story that comes at the midpoint of Jet Tagasa’s short story collection that beautifully and tragically encapsulates the OFW experience. In it, a supernatural being in human form works as a migrant worker because it sustains itself with others’ feelings of loneliness.

The plot itself is thrilling enough, but it’s the idea of an ages-old creature feeding off the sadness and the existential grind of workers far from the people they love—the thought of an ancient predator suddenly coming across an endless supply of prey brought about by a multitude of modern-day factors—that piques the interest. It feels modern in the same way that it must have felt to have Count Dracula arrive at then-contemporary Victorian England to start a whole new hunt. It’s imaginative and new, and not just a little bit disturbing.

This concept of modernity is a big part of The Secret Lives of OFWs: what if the monsters of Filipino myth and legend had to seek their fortunes overseas like many other Filipinos? It’s an idea that could go in many different ways, depending on how one prefaces the idea. Wouldn’t it be funny if? Wouldn’t it be terrifying if? Wouldn’t it be tragic if?

The Secret Lives of OFWs is all of these things in varying amounts. It’s funny (and astonishingly relatable!) for a mythical snake goddess moonlighting as a call girl in Hong Kong to exclaim “ayputangina!” when she loses her balance and falls over. It’s not so funny when some time later, she finds herself tied up in a serial killer’s bathroom. The sound of her voice can turn any mortal into her thrall, but as luck would have it, she has been gagged with a sex toy stuffed down her throat.

Secret Lives gets shockingly graphic at times. Violence of the stomach-turning variety is carried out by both the inhuman protagonists and the human antagonists of its stories. The gore accentuates the visceral nature of Filipino folklore: innards get sucked out, internal organs get eaten, and flesh-eating bugs get introduced into unwitting orifices. The mortals, on the other hand, keep up with the brutality on their end with more garden-variety sexual abuse, strangulation, and heads getting shot at point-blank.

Sometimes, children are on the receiving end of this violence. If this was intended to be disturbing, it absolutely succeeds.

The violence underlines a flaw with many of the stories, though: the plot is the same in roughly half of them. In these stories, some kind of injustice is inflicted upon the OFW, who is secretly one of the many nightmarish creatures from traditional legends. The OFW, pushed to the brink, retaliates with their powers. These revenge fantasies can be cathartic, but the formula becomes apparent very early on. In these stories, the supernatural element is weakened because it could be substituted with anything that could end in violence.

The rest of the stories are more interesting, with the exception of one that seems overly familiar—basically Aswang from Shake, Rattle & Roll II, but with a foreigner. In addition to the beast that feeds on loneliness, there’s a story about a couple on a long bus ride to rid themselves of a Maligno haunting, and one about a supernatural autopsy performed by the grieving parents of a Filipina killed overseas.

Those stories are uniquely Filipino, and capture different facets of what it must be like to exist as one of these creatures in hiding: sadness at the pettiness of mortals, outrage towards the evil that we have come to be capable of, or the personal horror of simply being.

Jet Tagasa narrates with the malicious delight of a storyteller huddled with her terrified listeners around a dim candle during a brownout. Her prose can be uneven at times, but it brings the necessary energy once the blood and guts start flying.

While not every story in The Secret Lives of OFWs is an absolute winner, there’s more than enough here to satisfy and inspire readers. Despite its uneven moments, The Secret Lives of OFWs offers a unique experience—one that blends Filipino folklore, social commentary, and imagination into something that horror fans won’t soon forget.