A book a day: Maximiliano Barrientos: The horizon of the cry

Original Language: castellano

Year of publication: 2024

Valoración: Between recommended and okay

It is clear that I do not dominate the labels that are assigned to the different subgenres of what we could call horror literature, so not to put the leg or think of mentioning any of those that may sound to me. I suppose that, as in so many other fields, they are nothing more than more or less intuitive or capricious classifications to distinguish trends, we like to organize concepts so much and order too broad things somehow, making them more manageable. In any case, as here in the blog we have experts in this field that could give a master class, I leave another work.

The dozen stories proposed by Maximiliano Barrientos say that we can at least locate them within the genre of terror, thus, in broad strokes. I would say that a slightly unique terror, with quite peculiar signs. In all we find elements that break into reality distorting it, without knowing if in an objective way or in the folds of the mental, perhaps both at the same time. He is a man who appears in a certain population before the news of his brother’s sudden death, a mayor suffering from a galloping cognitive impairment, the disappearance of a plane in the jungle, a former Nazi who keeps secrets about his son, or some young metalmen who want to burn a church. Stories that already border the proximity of death or situations of maximum tension, in which facts or experiences that cross the conventional line will be opened.

The stories are then admitted to strange worlds, sometimes tangible and sometimes incorporeal, strange behaviors, sounds or presences, trances that seem taken from experiences with hallucinogens, disappearances (and reappeARditions), hypersensitivity to establish connections. But also what seem to alienation episodes, extraction of organs or obsessions, an plane built in secret, human hybrids, seeing with the eyes of another or feeling his death as his own. Many things certainly for just a dozen stories not too extensive.

Barrientos tells it well, excellent while starting to develop stories incorporating the elements of mystery into a powerful and dosed crescendo. However, a point where the thread begins to get rid of, because surely the author wants at all costs to enter that world of nightmare, I would not know if it is because the transition is somewhat inconsistent. Perhaps it is that the connection between the real and the fantastic lacks a more convincing link, that immersion in these aberrant worlds is so unlikely that, even resulting in suggestive, it lacks some credibility to really make it terrifying it.

Or one may be too conventional reader and need a regret to feel really overwhelmed by the appearance of the strange. Perhaps the accumulation of stimuli or what seems like a deliberate search for confusion are not the best vehicle to transmit restlessness, and there what he painted as well -built stories ends up staying a little in anyone’s land.