SAIPAN — The legends of Sirena, the shark-protected woman of Tinian and Chief Taga are getting new life as fiction, with award-winning CHamoru author M. K. Aleja launching The Darkness Has Names, an interconnected collection inspired by the legends of the Mariana Islands.
The collection’s first three books, The Siren’s Daughter, Sisters of the Reef and Fall of the House of Taga, are now available in paperback through Amazon and Ingram’s global distribution network, making them orderable by readers, bookstores and libraries worldwide, Aleja announced this month.
Born and raised on Guam and now living in Alaska, Aleja grew up hearing many of the legends that inspire his fiction. Returning to them as a writer, he said, raised questions he had never considered: what human experiences might have inspired the legends, how the stories might have changed through generations of retelling, and what they might have sounded like before centuries of colonization, translation and cultural disruption.
“I grew up accepting these legends as the stories that had been passed down to us,” Aleja said. “It wasn’t until I began looking at them as a writer that I started wondering about the people who might have existed behind them and what parts of their stories may have been lost along the way.”
Aleja emphasized that the books are works of fiction rather than attempts to reconstruct definitive versions of the legends. “I’m not claiming that my versions are what really happened,” he said. “I’m asking what might have happened. What would these stories feel like if we placed CHamoru people, relationships, values and spiritual traditions back at their center?”
The settings span the archipelago. The Siren’s Daughter draws on the legend of Sirena and imagines a darker human story behind the tale in Spanish colonial Guam. Sisters of the Reef, set on Tinian, follows Gåni, a makåna and healer whose bond with two reef sharks grows into a sacred kinship between village and sea, threatened by Spanish colonization. Fall of the House of Taga weaves fragmented legends of Chief Taga into a historical dark fantasy spanning Guam, Rota and Tinian, following Taga from youthful pride through exile, leadership and eventual tragedy.
All three books have received 5-star editorial reviews from Literary Titan, with The Siren’s Daughter and Sisters of the Reef also earning the Literary Titan Gold Book Award. The reviewer called Sisters of the Reef a “luminous reef-song about kinship, erasure, and the stubborn afterlife of memory.”
Aleja, of CHamoru and Mexican heritage, began writing fiction in 2023 after a career in information technology and education. His previous works include Guardians of the Latte Stones, set during the Japanese occupation of Guam in World War II, and The Makåna’s Legacy, the first novel in The Yo’åmte Trilogy.
“I feel a responsibility to portray my heritage with care because, for some readers, these books may be their first meaningful introduction to CHamoru people and culture,” he said. “I’m proud when CHamoru readers tell me they recognize something of themselves in the stories, and I’m just as excited when someone unfamiliar with our culture wants to learn more because of something they’ve read.”
