Gone Girl…
Synopsis
One summer afternoon, Santi and Maria’s daughter disappears from a public park without a trace.
After months of agony and fruitless investigation that only serves to tear his life even further apart, Santi learns of a being that unleashes an entirely new kind of horror on the young family’s life:
“He Who Does Not Speak With Children.”
Review
There is something about “child gone missing” stories from the parents’ perspective that elicits a truly primordial, instinctive reaction of utter horror, whether or not you have children yourself, though I imagine they take on a unique flavour of hell if you do. But it’s the job of transgressive horror, that sub-genre that, like a literary equivalent of the SAS, goes where few dare, to push beyond that pain barrier and see what happens on the other side. And boy does Alicia is in the Basement by Santiago Eximeno—originally released in the author’s Spanish but now published by the ever-daring Tenebrous Press with an excellent English translation by Alicia L. Alonso—push. It pushes so hard that it is genuinely difficult to read at points, but, as in truly great novels that wade into these murky waters, it utilises lyrical prose and surreal imagery to impose a converse sort of twisted beauty into its deranged finale, helping us swallow the true horror of what’s unfolding before us. It challenged my sanity, and I loved it for it.
The child-snatching horror begins with father Santi and mother Maria in the park with their daughter Alicia. One minute she’s playing in the sandpit, the next… she’s gone. As the police investigation stalls, Santi, whose perspective we see the story through, starts to unravel and the remnants of his life begin to fall apart, but desperate hope comes with a clue: the whisper of a strange figure known as “He who does not speak with children”. The quest, however, to find this figure will take Santi to a new level of unspeakable horror.
The first remarkable, and remarkably difficult to read, thing about this novella is how the author treats the POV of Santi and his journey. No father would be expected to take such a situation well, but Santi’s path of grief is so wretched, that, like all good transgressive horror, it forces the reader to ask difficult questions: yes, he is undergoing an impossible situation, but does he have a responsibility to his wife (who, crucially, is pregnant with their second child) to manage it better? Was he a good husband to begin with? But even by questioning this, I started to question whether I was guilty of a failure of empathy. But does he deserve mine? These moral dilemmas, even before the true horror began, gave this book, which I devoured in one sitting, an unsettling extra layer of moral quandary.
But then, as Santi grasps onto this new lead of the whispered figure “He who does not talk to children” and vows to do anything he can to follow it to his daughter, the book takes a turn into unimaginable horror that I simply didn’t see coming, and it is horrific, genuinely hard to take, like dipping an open wound into a salt bath. The author doesn’t hold back on this nerve-shredding examination of the dark paths that grief can take you, and soon we are onto the surrealist, nightmarish endgame. By this point the book has taken on the characteristics of a real nightmare, yet described with a grotesque sort of beauty, and the denouement, which continues to ask deep, unrelenting questions about parental responsibility and the selfishness of grief, is at once dreamlike and utterly, utterly hellish.
It’s also worth quickly noting the excellence of Alicia L. Alonso, who translated this from its original Spanish into English. So good was this translation and so lyrical and fluent is the prose that I would never guess it had been translated if I hadn’t known prior. In an age where big publishers have begun to shamefully toy—or hint at planning to toy— with the apocalypse machine instead of hiring human translators, it’s important we emphasise that not only could AI not do this, but that we wouldn’t want it to either: the beauty of knowing the craft that has gone into this translation added to the wonder of this story.
Overall, this tale of a child gone missing and the unimaginably dark path her father will go down to get her back is transgressive horror at its finest: unrelentingly brutal, unexpectedly lyrical, unafraid to examine the difficult questions and laced with the twisted promise of hope that lies at the edge of insanity. If you can take it, you won’t forget it.
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