DARK ECHOES OF THE PAST, (Heredia Detective #13) is first one to make it into English

DARK ECHOES OF THE PAST (Heredia Detective #13)
RAMÓ DÍAZ ETEROVIC (tr. Patrick Blaine)
AmazonCrossing (non-affiliate Amazon.com link)
$3.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The first novel by multiple-award-winning Chilean author Ramón Díaz Eterovic to be translated into English―a landmark event for fans of crime fiction.

Private investigator Heredia spends his days reading detective novels; commiserating with his cat, Simenon; and peering out over the Mapocho River from his Santiago apartment. The city he loves may be changing, but Heredia can’t stop chasing the ghosts of the past. This time, they’ve come to him…

Virginia Reyes’s brother, an ex–political prisoner of dictator Augusto Pinochet, was killed in an apparent robbery. Yet nothing of value was taken. The police have declared the case closed, but Virginia suspects that things aren’t quite as they appear and turns to Heredia for help. Heredia couldn’t agree more―but he can’t shake the feeling that there’s something Virginia’s not telling him.

Heredia knows this is not a simple crime. His investigation proves it. Drawn back into a world where murderers nest, secrets are to kill and die for, and Pinochet’s legacy still casts a long, dark, and very threatening shadow, it’s all Heredia can do to crawl out of it alive.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I love a late-life career change story. I love a PI who drinks whiskey, takes mysterious women's troubles seriously, and reads books in the book I'm reading.

I'm annoyed that book thirteen is the first book to be translated from this long-running series. I'm still more annoyed that, after then translating book four, AmazonCrossing abandoned the project. "I guess they didn't sell enough of them" is an idiotic statement when referrering to a "they" that controls over half the US book-sales market and is part of a multi-billion dollar company. Define "enough" please.

Okay, the story itself: Dark as a black kidnapper's hood on a moonless night. Dark as a victim locked in a car trunk on a one-way trip to torture and death's mood. That's what it's about, after all. What happened in Chile under the US-backed Pinochet regime was full of stories like Virginia Reyes' and of course like her dead brother's.

Oh wait...maybe I have a glimmer as to why this series wasn't continued, and even maybe why the translator chose this one to start the Englishing with. Some glimmers of why I never heard much about the series crease my brain at last.

There is darkness at the heart of every empire. Look a millimeter under the shiny surface that's there to dazzle and entertain you and stories like this one are common as pig tracks. Kudos to Translator Blaine for using the dazzle to be a magnifying lens for the ugly, horrifying acts you're dazzled into not seeing. Have none of us really understood "The Lottery"? Or "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"? And those two, going back fifty, seventy-five, years weren't the first in their "look past the surface" genre.

A tense, intense, dark and twisty ride through the ugliest parts of an imperial project we still operate today. The definition of extraordinary rendition exists because of this story's well-explored historical roots. It should disgust and shame us all.

Authorial styles arise from decisions on how to present ugly facts. I found Author Eterovic's style, as ably translated by Patrick Blaine...you can feel a op-flight translation just like you can top-flight prose in your own language, and this is the stuff...right up my alley.

Recreational stress with a side order of ugly history, anyone?

PEDRO THE VAST, mycohorror/sporror at full throttle

PEDRO THE VAST
SIMÓN LÓPEZ TRUJILLO (tr. Robin Myers)
Algonquin Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Simón López Trujillo’s “mind-blowing” (Gabriela Cabezón Cámara) debut takes readers into a dry and degraded, fire-prone landscape where humanity has encroached a step too far into the natural world, and a deadly fungus mounts its own resistance . . .

In the disorienting, devastatingly tense world of López Trujillo, a eucalyptus farm worker named Pedro starts coughing. Several of his coworkers die of a strange fungal disease, which has jumped to humans for the first time, but Pedro, miraculously, awakes. His survival fascinates a foreign mycologist, as well as a local priest, who dubs his mysterious mutterings to be the words of a prophet. Meanwhile Pedro's kids are left to fend for themselves: the young Cata, whose creepy art projects are getting harder and harder to decipher, and Patricio, who wasn't ready to be thrust into the role of father. Their competing efforts to reckon with Pedro’s condition eventually meet in a horrifying climax that readers will never forget.

For readers of Jeff Vandermeer and Samanta Schweblin, López Trujillo is a next-generation Bolaño with a fresh, speculative edge and a mind that's always one step ahead of us.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Mycohorror, sometimes "sporror" (a play on "spore horror"), has a history that goes back a way. In our Anthropocene climate change-plagued times it's grown in prevalence and in popularity. The entire cultural interest in ecohorror is only growing. The Last of Us was quite a cultural moment; Jeff Vandermeer's Area X novels still fly off the shelves; in the QUILTBAG community T. Kingfisher's Sworn Soldier series makes a stir.

all of which makes my eyebrows rise a bit: y'all do realize this is the Earth herself rising in outraged fury against the disease process we represent to her body, like planetary chemotherapy, right? Considering the Anthropocene's awful effects on the Earth, we'll be lucky if all that happens is her fever goes up and she unleashes the ancient life-givers the fungi onto us because then a few will, by the immutable statistics of Life, will make it through.

Subtle weirdness abounds in the world-building, the eponymous Pedro being...affected...in ways that drive the plot but do not allow for him to be more than a name and a list of symptoms most of the time. The story reaches a climax I (experienced old weird-fiction reader that I am) saw coming, with a big reveal that was expected—albeit intense—and a niggling issue of "who exactly is telling me this story?" gets addressed.

I think the main draw of this read is the author's effective story design, and the excellent pitch of the prose...Translator Myers, take your well-earned bow...that makes it a pleasure to spend these 140ish pages with this team. I can see this being filmed and becoming a hit. Chile's natural beauty has been badly damaged, so it feels to me like the right cultural moment to do this story filmic justice.

It's short enough to make a solid weekend's reading but not so short you'll look up and think "...that's IT?" when you're done. The idea of horror is to give you a jolt, this does that (a bit late in the game, but definitely does it) and does a good job of reminding insular Anglophone readers that the world is much bigger than just our part.

I'd offer more stars if the twist was not so obvious. I've already said that this is a me thing; I expect you to know how much of my bugaboo stock you share by now, I've been at the reviewing game twenty years! Even if we share them all, this is a story I think is worth your time and treasure.