For those not in the know, Tangled Saviours: A Novel is author Tom Sykes’ new book and is set in 1986, and focuses on an abusive and substance-addicted action movie star Kirk Decker realizes that his survival is inextricably tangled with the fate of a matriarchal barangay (tribal community) in the 16th-century Philippines.

Meet Kirk Decker, abusive 1980s B-movie actor. He’s self-destructing from drink and drugs, and some people want him dead. While shooting an action film in the Philippines, he has unearthly visions and weird encounters.

Meet Dayang, the dutiful queen of a matriarchal tribe in 16th-century Luzon. Why are her people suffering from mysterious diseases? How can they call on the spirit world to save them? And what connects them through time, space and magic to Kirk and other violent white men in need of redemption?

Tom Sykes is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Portsmouth, UK and, as a journalist who has travelled extensively in Africa and Asia over the last 10 years, he has written for the London Telegraph, New Statesman, The London Magazine, Private Eye, The Scotsman, New Internationalist, Southeast Asia Globe, The Journalist, The Philippines Free Press and a dozen other titles.

I sat down with author Tom Sykes and we discussed everything about his new book, along with inspirations for some of the incorporated themes, and even what’s coming next:

Please tell us more about the lead character Kirk Decker in your latest book titled Tangled Saviors - “He’s a bad man in every possible way - racist, sexist, violent, ignorant, conceited - and he’s had far too many years of people saying “yes” to him. He’s also been traumatized by a childhood of violence and neglect, which has led him to a self-destructive lifestyle. However, he has one last chance for redemption and to atone for all the hurt he and his ancestors have caused to others.”

And was he always going to be named Kirk Decker, or were there other names in the running until the very end? - “Originally, I wanted to call him Kirk Smock because Kirk sounded very American and manly, while Smock struck me as archaic and effeminate. It was a contradiction that I liked. But then a friend pointed out that this name sounded like a homage to Star Trek (Captain Kirk and Mr Spock), and I didn’t intend that to be the case, Star Trek fan as I am. Decker was eventually chosen because it’s a corruption of a German name - Drechsler - that becomes important as the book flashes back to his ancestors, amongst them a German immigrant to the US who turns to fascism in the 1930s, and a Hapsburgian sailor who plays a brutal role in the Spanish colonization of the Philippines in the 1570s.”

In our book review [see below], we called it a “most wondrous, genre-blending, reality-blurring, masterful storytelling new prose,” a statement that I wholly stand by today, so please do enlighten us as to how this story of an abusive and substance-addicted B-movie action star who came to be entangled with Dayang, the queen of a matriarchal tribe in 16th-century Luzon, Philippines, first came to be in your head? - “It started with two images - and weirdly disjointed ones at that. I had this picture in my head of a mullet-wearing action movie star in 1980s America and another picture of a woman chieftain of a community in the pre-colonial Philippines (called a barangay in Tagalog) from a few hundred years earlier. I then started to wonder idly about how these two completely different people could come to sort of depend on each other through a form of magic that broke all the rules of time and space. The story just grew from me trying to figure out how I could possibly make that connection plausible.”

And have you yourself ever been to Luzon in the Philippines - “Yes. I lived in Quezon City in Luzon in 2009-10 and have been back to this great island perhaps 7 times since, mostly to conduct research for other books and academic projects.”

How long did it take for you to write this book, from first conception to final page? - “About 6 years. I first had the idea in 2018 after visiting a community in northern Luzon that had retained on its pre-Christian, animist beliefs. I then spent far too long telling friends about this zany idea I had to somehow connect Kirk with Dayang, and decided that I really needed to get my head down and write about it. That was aided massively by my joining a writing group and getting excellent advice from friends and colleagues with much more experience in penning fiction than I. I finally finished the novel in 2024 and it was published by Roundfire in late 2025.”

And what chapter/section did you find the hardest, and why? - “The climactic section in which Kirk’s physical breakdown comes to be mirrored by a series of natural and supernatural disasters that befall the barangay. Rapidly switching the narrative between very different times and places was a tough juggling act.”

With this kind of novel, it must be hard to not only come up with a new story prose to tell, but combine it with real world entities, places and such. Which did you find the hardest to bring into this book? The new line of storytelling or the dutiful factfinding of what a B-movie actor could actually be (in these circumstances) along with the landscape and more of 16th-century Luzon? - “The hardest part was connecting Kirk’s story to that of the barangay. I needed to think very hard about structure, most of all, and voice, to a lesser extent, in order to both offer the reader something (hopefully) new and astonishing, but not make it all too difficult to follow and enjoy.”

Ok, be honest, did you have a real-life B-movie action star in mind when you wrote this character? - “I did, but it’s more fun if readers try and guess who I was thinking of!”

In closing, what are you next working on book wise? I ask, especially as we are not called Exclusive Magazine for nothing, and so a little exclusive tidbit would be rather lovely to go to print with - “I’m very slowly working on a new novel about a teenage boy in suburban England in the 1990s who believes that he can predict the future and in other ways influence the world by conducting strange literary experiments. The story so far involves AI and the occult and is kind of a homage to the 1960s New Wave of Science Fiction writers such as Philip K Dick and JG Ballard.”

Exclusive Magazine’s review of Tangled Souls

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