The Tales of the Fog, by Laura Suárez

Have you ever had the feeling that a book was written for you? It just happened to me with Tales of the fog, by Laura Suárez. I already sensed it when I read the back cover, where it says that the stories of the fog are those stories that our grandmothers or mothers told us when we were little and that we didn’t know whether to believe them, even though they claimed that someone very close to them had told them or they had seen with his own eyes.

Laura Suárez was one of those girls who listened raptly to her grandmother’s stories, and I was too. Every evening, I would settle into my grandmother’s lap and tremble with fear as she told her stories about her Holy Company. And the Santa Compaña, that procession of souls in pain that rises at midnight from the cemetery to collect the souls of those who are going to die, also makes an appearance among the pages of Tales of the fogalong with other figures of Galician customs: the sweet who were dedicated to expelling the air of the deceased, San Campio, who helped those who suffered from I do itand the bircheswhich were those who saw death before it occurred because they had accidentally been anointed at baptism with the oil of extreme unction.

In this graphic novel, Laura Suárez recovers four scary stories from national folklore, to show us that our stories are as captivating as those that occur in distant lands. And she draws them with an aesthetic reminiscent of Marjane Satrapi, as El Torres rightly points out in the prologue, which contributes to increasing the disturbing setting of each of these four stories: “La Santa Compaña”, “El Aire”, “El Demon” and “El Vidoiro”.

Laura Suárez says that the origin of Tales of the fog goes back to that dark rainy afternoon in a village in Galicia, when his grandmother, sitting next to the wood stove, began to talk about a time when there were no roads or electricity, the dead wandered among the living and the use them They were as real as famine and civil war. And he also says that he does not know if he has written this work because of his fascination with that world that his grandmother told him about, so different from what it is now, or because of his interest in ensuring that this hidden facet of our culture does not fall into disrepute. oblivion With both reasons I feel immensely identified as a writer, reader and person. For this reason, I thank Laura Suárez’s grandmother for having transmitted to her that attraction for stories from other times, to Laura Suárez herself, for having created this wonder to recover them and, why not, to my grandmother, for having enchanted me since I was little with the power of good stories. Read Tales of the fog It has been like returning to his lap, and few books have given me a more special feeling than that.