At some point I stopped thinking that Quentin Tarantino was a director of the gore subgenre, that someone powerful in the film industry had liked him.
And I don't know why I stopped thinking about it. At the end of the day it is about blood and violence, if not free, at least low cost. But the fuck has his grace. At the end of the day it has its grace, I do not know why and how but it manages to elevate the gore to the altars of the cinema.
Something like this must also happen to Julian Herbert. Under the title Bring me the head of Quentin Tarantino, the writer invites the famous film director to guide the composition of these ten stories about the rugged, the immoral, the psychological, about philias and phobias (even those of God) and about the reasons for finding lucidity in madness and in the best composed sanity the longest shadows.
It is a bit of an exercise in impossible empathy with evil. And at the same time recognize that it is not necessary to empathize with evil, as it can go within each one. Each character in these stories comes to explain to us that evil is either domesticated or it can end up eating you in bites.
Because… after all, what is evil? It is probably the one you see in the other, while yours is a monster that accompanies you, arm over shoulder, waiting for you to approach that zebra crossing to use your arms and end up throwing an old woman to the center of the track … Rock and roll (nice scene for one of those lyrical scenes of the most disturbed and disturbing Tarantino).
Synopsis: Through these pages parade: a vengeful coach of personal memories; a Mexican bureaucrat who vomits on Mother Teresa of Calcutta at the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris; a crack reporter turned literary rodeo clown; the ghost of Juan Rulfo; a Lacanian and cannibal psychoanalyst; a video artist whose work consists of filming gonzo pornography with women with AIDS; God revealed as nini; a drug dealer identical to Quentin Tarantino obsessed with finding and murdering Quentin Tarantino.
They all inhabit worlds of altered ethical states. However, contrary to what might be thought, this alteration consists in that their ethics are more rigorous than ours; not fairer or more benevolent, but more ruthless.
The ten stories that make up this book are total vertigo, universes as eccentric as they are perfectly logical. From the tenderness of the Exterminating Angel, the violence of a laugh plagued with cavities transits. With a sharp and forceful prose - fierce as a slow lightning bolt - Julián Herbert reminds us that what we call "the human experience" is just a massacre of layers of onion, a blind and selfish zone that we are unable to elucidate.
You can now buy the book Bring me the head of Quentin Tarantino, the volume of short stories by Julián Herbert, here: