A book in the day: Edgar Cotes i Argelich: a cruel angel

Original Language: Catalan

A cruel angelby Edgar Cotes I Algierich, it is a brief novel of supernatural horror. In it, a father and his children leave Barcelona (after living a family tragedy and the confinement caused by Covid 19) and moved to a rural town in Lleida. His intention is to leave the past behind, face a better future and free themselves from their respective ghosts. However, its new cause houses an ominous force that will take advantage of its personal conflicts and internal tensions.

Go ahead A cruel angel I liked it. It is brief, is written with solvency and reads with interest. However, I recognize that its beginning has seemed much better than its outcome, that its development is too linear, that its characters (both protagonists and villains) are too basic and that the revelation of its main mystery, without falling into the anti -limitic, is somewhat disappointing.

Among the most successful sections of A cruel angel I would highlight two. The first would be the narrative voices that permeate the work. Not only are they moderately original, because they belong to a kind of omniscient Diegetic narrators (whose identities are denied to reveal) that they speak in the second person and directly question the protagonists, but also allow to tell the argument from different perspectives and explore the psychology of the characters.

The second virtue of A cruel angelmuch more discreet than the previous one but still claimable, is its cathartic background. And it is that Cotes takes advantage of it to address (among many other issues, such as the death of a mother, the love of adolescence or the reconciliation between parents and children) that of bullying, since he lived it as a child and knows how to provide him with a negligible authenticity.

In short, A cruel angel It is an entertaining, agile and solvent novel, which shows some particularly achieved section. While he had benefited, at least in my opinion, of a greater depth of his cast and argument, and of greater intensity in his terrifying imagery, he works perfectly as a simple history