Dead Season: A Story of Murder and Revenge

by Alan Berlow

This moody, brilliantly atmospheric work of reportage is the story of three murders that took place on the Philppine island of Negros. The first victim was a wealthy landowner. The second was an impoverished farmer who was massacred, along with his wife and three children, in a barrio whose name means "the place of the ghosts." The third was a young soldier, who may have been killed by communist guerrillas or on the orders of his commanding officer. On Negros, every death has many stories.

In tracing the shadowy connections among these events, Alan Berlow, a correspondent for National Public Radio, portrays a society in which democracy is at best a hopeful fiction and everyone is a collaborator by necessity. Beautifully written, rich in ambiguity, and as riveting as any crime thriller, Dead Season is a work of tragic depth and complexity.

"Like a tale from Faulkner or Marquez...a saga of surprisingly majestic proportions."--Laurie Garrett, author of The Coming Plague

"A passionately written tale about the chaos at the edge of the twenty-first century."--John Hockenberry, author of Moving Violations

324 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[bernadette · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book touched on a lot of themes that ran through stories that I heard or overheard about the Philippines while growing up from little touches about the local cockfights to the communists in the field to the fate of the sugar cane industry in the Philippines, so that it makes more sense to me now. I gained much more insight into why Aquino's presidency was a failure despite all the hope that people had for her at the beginning of her term. I was sometimes a little impatient with the author's attempts at more literary or poetic language and I felt that the book could have been better structured but Berlow did a good job of conveying the chaos and lawlessness of a small area ridden with violence and poverty.

[Nickky Faustine de Guzman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I rarely read non-fiction, but thanks to my boss, I got to read this magnificent tale. It's a must-read especially for Millennials who barely know anything about Bacolod.