Filipino journalist F.H. Batacan's Philippine National Book Award-winning debut, Smaller and Smaller Circles, is widely regarded as the first Philippine crime novel. All manner of crimes--corruption, assault, murder--along with everyday injustice, haunt Accidents Happen, Batacan's magnificent, searing collection of 11 partially linked stories.
At least three irresistible recurring characters are ready for standalone titles of their own. The trio--police officer Mike Rueda, journalist Joanna "Joe" Bonifacio, Father Augusto Saenz--make their collective debut in "No. 1 Pencil," which opens with a woman's corpse at the bottom of the stairs. Rueda needs Joe to connect him to Father Gus--a full-time priest and part-time forensic anthropologist--to figure out how the young, silent stepdaughter who lives in the "dark, narrow, musty room beneath the stairs" didn't do it.
Joe and Father Gus briefly reconvene in "The One Cry" over the exhumed body of an assaulted, murdered 19-year-old whose hope for "half-justice... [is] [s]ometimes... all we can hope for; most times that's all we can get." Murder won't let the priest sleep in "Comforter of the Afflicted," after he's called in by Rueda to figure out what happened to the twisted body of a 39-year-old banking official who lived alone: "she wasn't into sports but had climbed six mountains, wasn't much into clothes but had forty-three pairs of shoes."
Beyond murder, Batacan is particularly adept at inserting unexpected, disturbing relationships among the living. A lonely professor begins to care for--and becomes righteously attached to--a neighbor who uses a wheelchair and whose much-younger wife seems to blithely neglect him in "Door 59." In "Promises to Keep," a couple who parted after an intense three-month relationship reunite after he calls her to his bedside 11 years later. "Easy, white men" prove to be "transparent... predictable" targets for the narrator in "Harvest" for work she must do to keep her six-year-old daughter safe. In "Original Sin," a Filipino man reverse immigrates back to his family home in Manila from the U.S. and finds "nothing's changed" with the woman who reluctantly greets him there.
Batacan is a gloriously sly writer, never allowing complacency to simplify her narratives. Amid rising body counts and unpunished infractions, she occasionally assumes the role of both judge and executioner, adroitly inserting necessary, satisfying consequences--as with a specialty knife able to exact deserving vengeance on cheaters in "The Gyutou" or punitive spirits that wreak mass destruction on abusers in "Road Trip." Machinations and manipulations couldn't be more welcome. Audiences will only want more, more, more. --Terry Hong
Shelf Talker: All manner of crimes determine the superbly satisfying stories in Filipino journalist F.H. Batacan's magnificent story collection, Accidents Happen.