Two strange, black (in their own way) and recommendable novels

Today we bring two novels based on that terrain that we like to travel: the one on the margins of the genre.

Both have aspects that fit them within the broad conception of crime novels and others that take them completely out of almost any label.

They have absolutely nothing to do with each other: the first (

) is a black comedy;

the second (

), a criminally tinged philosophical exploration of a terrifying near future.

Something to put in your mouth before the list —as big as strength and time allow us— that we will make for the Madrid Book Fair.

Come by and read.

Everyone in my family has killed someone

All the problems that this novel could pose (humor, insightful approach against the clichés of crime novels, appeals to the reader) are dissipated in the first 50 pages.

Stevenson, who with this third novel has slipped into the select club of those translated all over the world, knows how to tell a story, knows how to laugh at himself, the characters and the genre, and manages to keep the reader with this bizarre family.

The protagonist and narrator is Ernie Cunningham, a man his family does not forgive for testifying against his brother Michael, accused of murder.

It's true that Ernie saw Michael finish off the victim, but this is a very special family.

A meeting in a mountain refuge in the middle of a heavy snowfall serves to meet everyone and see how the disaster already announced on the front pages is approaching.

The humor works and Stevenson knows how to keep the narrative pulse, go from back to front without the reader losing anything, tell us with malice the thousand defects of these gentlemen and these ladies who love each other in a strange way and hate each other with joy.

How many authors would give an arm for two achievements like this (or should, if they realized their importance).

Notice to sailors: it's a fun novel, but not a friendly one;

there are dark moments and a sarcasm that, within the general madness that is the approach, leave a curious taste in the mouth.

Any problem?

Well, maybe it gets too crazy at some point, depending on taste, but if you want to have a good time it works.

The rumor and the insects

“The first hypotheses, I tell you, considered the possibility of a ritual suicide.

Apparently, the three girls played the violin.

Annie Härtmann, the only survivor of her, ended her days admitted to a mental institution near Boschtraat.

Do you wonder what a social anthropologist has to do with a crime committed fifty years ago?

Well everything.

That's what I want to talk to you about.

I am going to show you that in those deaths is the essence of what is human… the will to die, what some theorists call singularity”.

These words, pronounced by the protagonist of the story before an audience of young people at a university at some point in the not so distant future, accelerate a complex plot shortly after the beginning, which uses and speaks of identity games, reflections on singularity and the search for the meaning of life,

memory traps... and much more.

And all tucked into a criminal plot, a structure used with skill by Ferrando to do what seemed impossible: that the reader remains trapped in the fabric woven by him and does not stop turning pages.

More information

Thirteen good black novels analyzed and commented for the Easter holidays

The protagonist is a lost man and the reader wants to know his destiny, empathizes with his suffering, feels, in a world terrifyingly similar to the one in the novel, identified with the fears and phobias of the anthropologist.

And he wants to know why the girls died.

He plays in favor of all this a demanding prose with the reader but fine-tuned by the author so as not to fall into complacency.

The predominant point of view, in a first person present, helps the action flow.

The novel is littered with more or less clear references, which readers will have already seen in many cases also reflected in the audiovisual.

Against all odds, history does not capsize when almost 400 pages later it continues to open up options and alternatives;

It also makes it so that it does not matter if certain futurist assumptions have been superseded in the time it has taken for the book to be published and in this era of the explosion of artificial intelligence, because in this novel you have to go to the ultimate explanation of things , not the context.

It is not a work for lovers of the classical genre.

It is coffee for very coffee lovers, we are not going to deceive you.

But it is worth the trip.