ANTARA / a genre-breaking anthology
Antara is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
how it works
ANTARA collects short story/flash fiction pieces blending crime, horror, contemporary, literary, magical realism, thriller, and satire with a wide variety of Asian cultures. Every piece is set in the eponymous city and can be read in any order. Stories with multiple parts are grouped according to their title and numbered.
the vibes
ANTARA / an introduction
Welcome to Antara, where the days are wild and the nights are to die for. From Nantoro Square to He-Ong to Maynila Green to Kurosawa Territory, you can find whatever you want here, for whatever price you’re willing to pay. Nothing is off-limits. Not designer handbags, cheap bootlegs, steaming hotpots, innocence, souls, time, lives. Everything’s for sale, so long as you know the right fellow on the other side of the counter. Depending on where you’re looking and who you ask, it’s a nine-hundred square kilometre party that never ends, or it’s a bottomless gutter people feed their dreams to—a beast, a rave, neon, elemental, raging, hating, loving.
It is an archipelagic city-state situated between the West Philippine and South China Seas: a medley of hyper-urbanised gentrified cityscapes, jagged EKG-trace skylines, trash-glutted slums, throbbing nightclubs, roving green hills, and beaches wrought with starlight. It is peopled by people from all walks of life and death and anywhere in-between, from the cream of the crop to the survivors desperately trying not to drown under the white.
Superstition’s not just a guide in Antara—it’s a manual, an ever-present fog you can smoke and get high on, a clay you can heat up, a mist that blinds you from what you need. Ever since the Indosphere, ever since its dark-faced natives could rub stones to strike fire together, the veil between worlds below and worlds above has never quite been so thin.
Never colonised, but occupied by Spain, America, Britain, Japan, and China over the course of its history, its Western influences remain present in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Predominantly spearheaded by amicable trade relations with China, Japan, Korea, and India, Antara has developed into a global hub for capital and all the sinful excesses which come with her. The population is a broiling melting pot of ASEANs, East Asians, South Asians, and to a lesser extent South Americans, Africans, Europeans. But whether you’re an expat or Antaran born-and-bred, you’re beholden to forces greater than you. Whether that be the market, the gods, the gangs, family, fate, or all of the above, no one’s a stranger to a capital-H Hoodwink.
So before you book your flight, say your prayers. Or your sutras. Your analects, your aphorisms and your axioms. Remind yourself you’re still you.
Just clean up the blood when you’re done, alright?
tales from the city
ANTARA 001 / Kabukimono
After a yakuza boss dies, his zealous second-in-command embarks on a nighttime odyssey through sex, power, and demonology.
ANTARA 002 // Dokkaebi
An Antarapop boyband struggle against the oppressive regime of their management. Pretty porcelain people do their best not to shatter.
ANTARA 003 // Transubstantiation
Told almost entirely through text messages and call transcripts, 'Transubstantiation' is a boy's journey through divine madness following the sudden passing of his mother.