Heritage, the desire to endure, fatherhood, horror, the intimate and the political intertwine in this free, daring, and deeply hypnotic novel.
A father and son travel across Argentina by road, from Buenos Aires to the Iguazú Falls, during the military dictatorship. Along the way, armed checkpoints and constant tension reveal a country gripped by fear. The son, Gaspar, is still a child, and his father tries to protect him from a fate that seems inevitable. The mother has died under ambiguous circumstances, in an accident that perhaps was not one.
Like his father, Gaspar is destined to become a medium for a secret society known as the Order, a group seeking eternal life through contact with Darkness and the practice of atrocious rituals. The price these mediums pay is devastating: physical and mental wear is swift and relentless. The Order, dominated by Gaspar’s powerful maternal family, has roots in a dark history stretching back centuries, from Africa to England and finally Argentina.
The novel unfolds a disturbing universe inhabited by houses that mutate from within, passageways hiding impossible creatures, sacrifice rituals, enigmatic sexual liturgies, and objects turned into fetishes. It also crosses the psychedelic London of the sixties, where Gaspar’s mother met a young androgynous singer named David, and delves into the political violence of the dictatorship, the disappeared, the uncertain arrival of democracy, and the early years of AIDS in Buenos Aires.
In this work, supernatural terror merges with very real historical horrors. A disturbing and dazzling novel that confirms Mariana Enriquez as one of the essential voices of 21st-century Latin American literature.
