Monstress

Starred review from October 17, 2011
Spanning several decades and diverse settings, Tenorio’s debut story collection is a vibrant survey of Filipino-American immigrant history. The tales are tragic, but Tenorio makes the most of his gift for black humor. “Save the I-Hotel” follows friends Vincente and Fortunado, going back to their meeting 43 years before in Manilatown, San Francisco, in the 1930s, when the law forbade Filipino men from bringing their wives to America and pursuing white women was a dangerous enterprise. At a leper colony in the Philippines, a young Filipina who spent time in America before her disease appeared begins a relationship with an infected AWOL American soldier in “The View from Culion.” Reva Gogo, a famous actress,looks back on her early days in Manila making horror movies with her struggling director, Checkers Rosario, and the trip they made to Los Angeles, where he expected to break into the big time. In “Felix Starro,” a quack doctor travels to San Francisco to perform his famous Extraction of Negativities, involving fake blood and chicken livers, while the grandson who accompanies him must decide whether to continue in the family business or take the money and run. This question—to exploit one’s own or to be exploited—is shrewdly evoked by the author’s blend of the harrowing and the absurd.

December 15, 2011
Unusual culture clashes between the Philippines and the West drive this intimate and admirably controlled debut story collection. Tenorio has a great knack for striking story premises. "Help" is narrated by a young man who's recruited by his uncle to attack the Beatles at the Manila airport for supposedly disrespecting Imelda Marcos. "The View From Culion" is set in a leper colony where a young Filipino woman attempts to connect with a stranded American. "Felix Starro" is narrated by a young man who helps take advantage of San Franciscans with a faith-healing scam, and the heroine of the title story is an attractive actress who's spent much of her career relegated to wearing monster costumes in junky B-movies. In each of these eight stories, Tenorio cultivates a plainspoken (but not blunt) style that recalls Tobias Wolff, and the conflicts are straightforward as well, usually dealing with lost innocence and heartbreak. The best stories add an extra layer of complexity: "The Brothers" tracks the different impacts a transsexual man's death has on his family and his friends in the community, while "Save the I-Hotel" leaps back and forth in time to follow the tense relationship between two Filipino immigrants in San Francisco as they manage homophobia, xenophobia and the destruction of the residence hotel where they'd spent their lives. Like many young story writers, Tenorio has talent and ideas to burn, though he isn't always certain where he wants to take those ideas. For every story like "I-Hotel" or "Superassassin," in which a young man's anger metastasizes into a terrifying comic-book fantasy, there are others that end with vaguely artful gestures that don't quite clarify what has changed within the characters. An introduction to a promising writer who knows how to get a reader's attention, though he occasionally has trouble sticking the landing.

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December 1, 2011
These eight stories are long, complex, and powerful, bringing alive on the page both Filipinos on their native turf and others who have immigrated to the U.S. This first collection introduces a writer of great promise, whose stories can illustrate tenderness at one minute and human cruelty not much later. Tenorio's writing is immediate, visceral even, and illustrates how human beliefs, principles, and drives are complicated by the choices people make. Superassassin shows us the mental processes of a boy who believes his own violent scripts, leading to a horrifying ending. A family funeral, the setting for The Brothers, also presents the opportunity for revenge, by a conservative mother on her son, who has undergone a sex change. And Save the I-Hotel, set in 1970s San Francisco, is a story of the tenderness between two Filipino immigrantsVicente, whose love for Fortunado is that of a friend, and Fortunado, who has been in love with Vicente for 43 years. This collection is a vital addition for short-fiction collections. Buy it for readers of Junot D-az, Chang-Rae Lee, and Jessica Hagedorn.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)