By: Andres Barba
Genre: Horror Fiction
Page Count: 108
Marina has had an accident. Her father is dead, her mother is in hospital, where she dies later. She is taken to an orphanage where other girls her age live. She is given a doll by a psychologist, who also asks her many questions about the accident. But she doesn’t feel grief; maybe because grief is too new or mature for her childhood. She is received as an outsider in the orphanage by the other girls: a mixture of envy, curiosity, and admiration. However, they destroy her doll, tear it into parts, and bury it with a dead caterpillar. Now, Marina misses her doll. She invents a game where each night a girl is turned into a doll – a game that becomes their nightly ritual.
I’ve pretty much written out the whole plot of this small in size but hugely horrifying book, but I bet that everyone reading this book, even after having read this detailed description, would feel as much haunted, weirded out, gutted, and psychologically perplexed as I was.
Barba’s childhood horror story is as seriously good and psychologically convincing as any great horror story needs to be. Utterly gripping and gut-turningly weird, this short novella leaves its lingering effects long after one has closed the book, which I’m almost certain about having just finished this book.
The reasons for this horror story being so good is not only the horrific plot, which is a reduced version of a true story from 1960s Brazil, but also Barba’s poetic and arresting prose along with his ability to persuasively tell story with its psychological inclinations and astonishing details.
Edmund White’s afterward at the end of the book (where all the introductions from other authors should be placed) beautifully summarizes and brings to notice the almost magician quality and importance of Barba’s novella.
And while I am not any expert or even a learned person in the fields of psychology or childhood, after reading White’s emphatic afterward, I can now see, more clearly, the uniqueness of Barba’s prose: where sometimes it seems like a crisp visualization of a nightmare, at others it brings a wild and haunting imagination onto the paper; at once terrifying but so irresistibly good that one turns the pages but does so with a cautious fascination.
What more can I say? It is a short book and a
brilliant horror story, therefore guaranteed that you’ll enjoy reading it. And why
should you read it? Because it is one hella unique book!
And yeah, read it slowly...
Rating 5/5 ***** December 27, 2020_