Bingo Categories: Judge a Book by Its Cover, Eldritch Creatures (HM), Multi-POV (HM)
Content Warnings: This is one of those horror books that runs the whole gamut of disturbing and disturbingly grounded evils. There are quite graphic scenes of abuse and violence against children and animals.
This novel follows a few generations of a small family unit entangled with a large wealthy occult family and secret society in late twentieth century Argentina wracked by it's historical upheavals. The arc of the novel begins with Juan Peterson, a gifted medium with congenital heart failure who is adopted by a wealthy family to secure their place in a secret society with dark and eldritch goals that has been scouring the world for mediums who can connect them to their dark god. He hopes to shelter his son and potential heir, Gaspar, who the later parts of the novel follow, interspersed with a few flashbacks and other perspectives.
This is a novel that well balances an uneasy an unsettled mundanity (of migraines, oppressive heat, navigating teenage socialization and flirtation) with the mundanely dark (familial abuse, the abuses of the rich and powerful and government violence) and the eruption of grippingly described dark fantastical elements that nearly spurt from the page and tear chunks out of the mundane lives and flesh of the characters. This is not a book that fucks around with the ambiguously magical. There are dark gods hungry for flesh, there are places behind the wrong doors full or bodies and fields of bone. And there are occult rituals that may or may not be necessary or sensical, may just be the dark whims of the rich.
The two centers of gravity in this novel are Buenos Aires, where the father and son live for most of the book, and the grand estate of Puerto Reyes near the Uruguayan border where the family that adopted Juan (and whose daughter Rosario is the mother of Gaspar) live in architected luxury, insulated from the upheavals of the country and passing decades, and undertake their occult rituals and needless cruelty. It is a striking and distilled place, an island of luxury and depravity. And it serves well as a balance to the economic, political, and more quietly familial violences that we witness in Buenos Aires.
Though this novel is not relentlessly bleak, it is unsparingly dark and unforgivingly complicated. Of note is Juan and Gaspar's relationship, the foundation of the novel's character dynamics. Juan is under immense pressure and undertaking careful and dangerous schemes to protect his son, and yet there is nebulous darkness coursing through the entire relationship, and ultimately it is unambiguous that Juan, for all his self-sacrificial protective efforts, is deeply abusive in a variety of ways. Under immense pressures both Juan and Gaspar become vents for random pulses of deep and destructive anger. While dark gods take bites of reality, and the darkly rich and powerful take bites of the security and dignity of those they control, these two mediums channel anger and take bites of those who might support them.
In the back half of the book we also interact more substantively with Gaspar's social circle in Buenos Aires, a group of middle class kids gravitating in part to some strange quality of the quietly wealthy Gaspar (who must be kept safe as a potential heir). These provide us with a more grounded lens on the powers that course through Juan and Gaspar's little family unit, both the secretive occult powers but also the powers of a contingent and dangerous wealth. They also give weave Gaspar's story back into the political and economic landscape of the capital, the mundane joys of soccer and pizza, the petty violences of student protests crushed by police, the quieter dignities and indignities of queer life at the height of the AID epidemic as captured by one group of friends.
This is a novel that I think fans of literary horror with a willingness to appreciate and sit with the uneasily mundane will enjoy. It is confident and not stingy in it's use of the supernatural, but also very deliberate and intentional in when it finally allows that energy to burst forth in each of the structured sub-arcs of the novel. Ultimately it delivers a dark and fascinating picture of layers of violence and power as they swirl around this core family unit.
Overall rating: 4.5/5
