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Home Like A Haunting in Victor Manibo’s The Villa, Once Beloved
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Home Like A Haunting in Victor Manibo’s The Villa, Once Beloved
The Villa, Once Beloved is a taut microcosm of one of the Philippines’ most formative modern horrors.
By Maya Gittelman
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Published on January 26, 2026
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For it wasn’t history, was it? All was in the here and now, happening again, happening continuously, because it never stopped. Not the plunder, not the atrocities, not the constant evasion of consequences and denial of justice.
The title promises a halcyon thing, and indeed we meet the Sepulveda patriarch at his messy end. Emblematic of his family villa’s former glory, Raul Sepulveda dies suddenly and strangely, found dead in his bed with dirt-stained hands in a scene that plumbs darker depths as the story unfolds in his aftermath. Cut to two days later, we meet our main POV character, Sophie, as she journeys on a Gulfstream with her boyfriend of two years, Raul’s grandson Adrian, from Stanford to the Philippines. She’ll be staying at his ancestral family home Villa Sepulveda, designated a “Heritage House” by the National Historical Institute, here to support him through his grandfather’s funeral and to spend more time with his family, who she’s only met once before.
Sophie’s also the only person who knows Adrian is working on a documentary film about his family. While they are close with the Marcoses, one of the families most culpable for political violence against the Filipino peoples, Adrian rejects those politics (though it’s through his family’s privileges that Adrian has access to things like Stanford, private jets, and bringing weed gummies to a country notorious for the extrajudicial execution of people purported to possess drugs). Adrian’s family disparages his choice of major, and Sophie understands his project as an act of rebellion. His mentor thinks he might make it to Sundance.
Sophie herself is Filipino, but what other diaspora Filipinos may know—a private jet with her own little cabin and a shower is an unheard of version of the homeland voyage, for one, even business class is prohibitively pricey—goes in part over her head. Not only is this Sophie’s first trip to the Philippines, this is her first time on a plane. Born to a Filipina who died getting her to the States, Sophie was adopted and raised by a white Midwestern couple in a small town in Nebraska. She did not grow up around other Asian people, and drove herself to Stanford as soon as she could. Sophie thinks of her parents with a distance that evidences the barriers to their connection. The reader understands early on that Sophie craves a connection to her Filipino culture which she never got until she joined some Filipino-American clubs at Stanford and met Adrian.
Adrian Sepulveda was born to Enrique “Eric” Sepulveda and a blonde white American mother. He has introduced Sophie to almost everything she knows about her Philippine heritage, and all he’s ever known of Villa Sepulveda are lovely vacations with his grandparents. There is much about his grandfather and the rest of his family he does not learn until Raul Sepulveda dies. There is also much he has always known, and chosen either not to believe, or not to shoulder.
Their trip and the novel take place over a two week span, encompassing the Holy Week of Easter, the prayer-heavy funerary days following a Filipino Catholic’s passing, and Stanford’s junior year spring break. As the now-scattered Sepulveda clan gathers to bury their patriarch, the usual typhoons hit early and extra hard this year. Sophie finds herself, the Sepulvedas, and their staff sequestered in the villa’s secluded mountain town of Maalin, in Leyte province. There in those two weeks, the household unfurls secret details of Raul’s death and the life that came before it. Like so many powerful men, Raul Sepulveda found himself deeply concerned with controlling his legacy, only to helplessly cede all control in death.
With him gone, all that’s left is the truth.
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The Villa Once Beloved
Victor Manibo
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The Villa Once Beloved
Victor Manibo
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The Villa, Once Beloved is a taut microcosm of one of the Philippines’ most formative modern horrors. It’s true horror, and it’s also very funny, which is also very Filipino. Manibo asks you to consider perspective: Who is telling the story, and who is receiving it? The book features a varied cast of characters with different relationships to their Filipino identity. The core point-of-view characters are: Javier, first gen Filipino-American, raised by his family in California; Sophie, Filipino but raised in the Midwest by white parents; and Remedios, the Villa Sepulveda caretaker, who was born to the previous caretaker, and has never left.
Within those fateful two weeks, many secrets claw their way to light. Who is entitled to story, eulogy? Who is entitled to shape their own legacy? Who is forced to tend to terrible secrets like one might tend to a house or garden, so that others may live in comfort?
Every character is at war with themself in some way. The “Philippine identity” diaspora Filipinos might search for, the poetic hope of a homelike belonging to a place you are from though are not of—that identity has so many ties and tangles to imperialism. It continues to be deeply striated by class and proximity to whiteness, which encompasses anti-indigeneity, violent capitalism, and all the horrors that entails.
As a mixed white Filipino-American myself, with the bulk of my mother’s family born and raised in the Philippines, not a word of this book rings anything other than strikingly, painfully true. That’s the thing with seeking solace and community in your Philippine birth country when you grew up American: We inherit great loveliness, but for those of us on the privileged side of diaspora, we discover at some point that we also inherit great guilt and grief.
Centuries of dehumanization at the hands of colonizers made the more privileged Filipinos—the ones with enough generational resources to outsource the manual labors of construction, cooking, cleaning, farming—eager to assert their Filipino identity and prove their power over their countrymen, country-people, kapatid. We see this in so many places ravaged by imperialism; inequity breeds inequity, and those with a smidge of power can be quick to centralize it. The corruption of Philippine officials goes almost without saying for Filipinos, as does the uncomfortable, persistent, pernicious reality that if you are of a certain class—and it doesn’t need to be “affords private jets or even first class” class—you are probably fewer than three degrees of separation related to an oppressor.
I’m oversimplifying slightly—and this is my own interpretation of my own experiences with privilege, class, and proximity to whiteness. But the facts are clear and the resonance is uncanny. As a diaspora person, a mixed person, an American—what is and is not my story to tell? Adrian sets out to make a documentary, highlighting Philippine trauma in part caused by his family while giving himself the academic remove of a filmmaker.
This is perhaps my favorite element of this book: its varied and deeply felt Filipinoness. So many different Filipinos in one family and their surroundings, so many different experiences lived in the people pressed up against them, tangled in their web. Of course American and Spanish imperialism is a looming presence, informing the story (in why the Filipino military officers are so liable to corruption, why the Spanish names and the violent strive for sovereignty), but this is a story about and between Filipinos.
At its core, The Villa, Once Beloved is about how violent capitalism is at the core of most if not all systemic evil, and how laborers suffer when landowners and capitalists put profit over people, dehumanizing the very people they use to build and harvest their wealth. At first I found the ending nearly too tidy, but upon reflection it works with the genre—and it does feel like the only way this book can end. As satisfying as it possibly could be.
This is also a horror story about how a bad secret can be made worse by truth’s avoidance over time. The demons that come to plague the Sepulvedas are a direct result of their actions and their relationship to the fallout. Manibo weaves Filipino folklore into the Gothic genre to literalize this beautifully, violence made manifest into something twisted and rooted in the specificity of the land. An ingenue in the midst of a raging storm, her world narrowed to one family’s dominion and its specific horrors. A rotting corpse within the proverbial floorboards, a gaping wound in the flesh of the family, left to fester and attract monsters. The way death can unmoor one’s very ecosystem, the way rituals of grief can sometimes be reassuring, sometimes horribly discordant. Ghost as in subverting a natural relationship to place and time, a monstrous breaking through of violence—or, perhaps, a response to monstrous violence itself.
Manibo’s biting humor and deep compassion shape the story, wrestling with means and modes of grief and guilt, family duty, national identity, and nonbelonging. Diaspora sometimes as an opportunity for escape, as the privilege of avoidance, and what we lose or inherit when that ocean’s been crossed. You cannot undo what you have inherited, no matter how violent the legacy. Generational cruelty, marrow-deep shame. It is awful to reckon with, to survive, to remember, but it is the least you can do. You can choose not to uphold that legacy, but you can never not be from it.
May death not be a reprieve for those who considered themselves masters of death for innocents. Some reputations, some houses, maybe even some grandfathers, are too rotten to save.
Manibo conjures true magic here, a thick and tender tale with a hopeful sort of justice as a system of belief. True and necessary work, thoroughly imagined and expertly executed, flaying and vindicating and terribly inviting.
I love this one. Read it.[end-mark]
The Villa, Once Beloved is published by Erewhon Books.Read an excerpt.
The post Home Like A Haunting in Victor Manibo’s <i>The Villa, Once Beloved</i> appeared first on Reactor.
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