John Bengan’s Armor is a debut collection of thirteen stories set largely in Davao from the late 1990s onward, tracing lives lived under political spectacle and the normalisation of fear.

Drug users, queer characters, students, families, vigilantes and ordinary bystanders move through a city where power is often intimate before it is institutional. Summary executions, authoritarian mythology and the cult of the strongman are approached through people whose private lives continue anyway—people falling in love, grieving parents, entering beauty pageants, visiting doctors, trying to stay alive. Stories include a new recruit’s first day in a death squad, a drug user preparing for a Miss Gay pageant, and a vigilante mayor moving through the city disguised as a taxi driver. The result is less a panoramic account of Davao than a series of close exposures: terror as atmosphere, and endurance as something improvised rather than heroic.

Armor won the 23rd Madrigal-Gonzalez Best First Book Award in English and was a finalist for the 41st National Book Awards in short fiction.

Edition / condition: Bughaw / Ateneo de Manila University Press, Quezon City, 2023. Second printing; first printing 2022. Paperback. Light shelf wear and rubbing to covers with minor corner wear; internally clean and unmarked, binding firm. Very good condition.