That readers already have the last word when it comes to leading a writer to success is incontestable. Desktop publishing platforms, or crowfunding publishing platforms, can achieve a final accolade of such magnitude that large publishers have no choice but to bid for them. You no longer need great advisers, genius seekers or risky bets. Visiting the Amazon sales lists can be enlightening.
The example of Blas Ruiz-Grau joins a cast of great references. From Eva Garcia Saenz but also Javier Castillo o Michael Santiago, to name some of the most recognized and that have ended up being featured under major publishing labels.
It is also true that, by briefly analyzing the plot motives that usually make a freelance writer succeed in the first instance in desktop publishing, we usually find black stories, dark mysteries, plots of psychological suspense.
It is clear that these are good times for most noir literature in any of its ramifications. AND Blas Ruiz-Grau It is no exception.
This Alicante author communicates in similar wavelengths as the aforementioned writers. Any of his novels is a ticket for a journey through the dark recesses of the soul. There where evil is rampant towards the materialization of crime.
In these cases, he who is capable of offering new arguments, a good performance in the narrative trade and a maximum narrative tension, achieves what has happened with Blas: an overwhelming success.
Top 3 recommended books by Blas Ruiz Grau
No lies
Contrasts are always great allies to end up awakening fuller sensations in one extreme sense or another. Let's imagine a clown, the emblem of childhood, a source of laughter and fun…, now let's imagine Pennywise, the sinister clown from It, the story of Stephen King.
Yes, I was referring to that creepy annoyance. Common places, everyday life, what is known to all but transformed by the writer towards the most strange or sinister, ends up acquiring maximum scenic power.
This novel can start as a sentimental story in the face of the tragedy of a father who is leaving for good, with whom hardly a few words have been exchanged in recent years.
But on his return to a town in Alicante brimming with the strange light of circumstances, Carlos, the son, will find that a very different reality hides behind his father's suicide.
The light filtered between the old streets of the town begins to awaken the shadows of a hidden message, of a posthumous secret offered without a doubt by the father to the son. By then death has brought a dark storm of destruction to the scene.
Seven days of march
It is always a pleasure to find historical fictions, with more fiction than history, for a period as dark as the Spanish Civil War.
Although to be precise, this story starts among the rubble at the end, while the victors recall looted property and the defeated count their victims.
Among the vanquished is Juan, a strange emblem of a youth forged from the side of those who have been left with nothing and who are still being persecuted as soon as their convictions are discovered.
In the author's taste for narrative contrasts, his character as Juan meets a Carmen from the other side, although full of that rebellion and that disagreement of someone who knows himself on the comfortable side over the heads of the underprivileged.
But the impossible love story between the two advances almost in a complementary way. Because the purpose of these young people is not to live a happy love story.
Not at least in the development of this story. The inertias of the underworld to which Juan guides her will lead Carmen to form a subversive group that intends to confront the nascent regime with an enigmatic plan that keeps the reader glued to its unexpected development and end.
Because, beyond the facts, in historical literature it is interesting to become convinced that something can change with respect to what really happened. Uchronies in which everything is possible.
The truth will make you free
Writer's wood is something that comes as a blessing and that can manifest itself as soon as someone sits down at the computer with the intention of telling any story.
Tackling a mystery novel about some of those transcendental enigmas of our civilization is a very great temptation for every author. But in the end it is about knowing how to do it (including documentation, consistent argument, narrative tension and that balance between agility and manifest knowledge on the subject).
In this story, rewritten by the author (thanks to Amazon's desktop publishing program) we face a fascinating journey, the one Carolina undertakes after her father is murdered. At his side, subtly convinced by the young woman's investigation, we find Inspector Nicolás Valdés. Between the two of them they wander through the dark recesses of the past. That time when knowledge was gathered by a few.
The Templar treasure has always been an inexhaustible reference for assumptions, research as well as for literature and cinema. And this novel is a good sample, one of those great redeemers of that theme.
Other recommended books by Blas Ruiz Grau
the bearded vulture
Legends also have a fabulous point at times. Strange customizations of animals capable of animosity beyond the simple predation that may befall their kind. The mixture of the police with that even esoteric point of the most sinister myths conspire in this story to arouse atavistic fears, sensations that the human being still inhabits a space where he can meet that popular imaginary that sometimes seems chillingly true.
What are the origins of the most terrifying legends? How are our greatest fears born? And, above all, what would happen if they came true? Years ago, Nicolás Valdés moved away from his hometown in the Madrid mountains, leaving his past there. In this time he has become the most prestigious police inspector in the country and has known the darkest darkness of the mind of psychopaths.
However, a violent murder will force him to return and face those who he wanted to forget and the legends of the place, which have been hidden for too long... While he tries to investigate the event against the wishes of the local authorities, the inhabitants of the area insist on a legendary theory: the bearded vulture, a murderous creature that returns every forty years. And this time he won't stop until his bloodlust is quenched.
In this vibrant crime novel, Blas Ruiz takes us into the inspector's past and into the mythology of a small town where the greatest fear is born from a question that everyone asks in silence: what if the terrible creature is actually one of them? from them?
