A few names occupy the space of editorial phenomena in Spain in recent years, in my opinion specifically four, two men and two women: Dolores Redondo, Javier Castillo, Eva Garcia Saenz y Victor of the Tree. In this quadrant of good work and the consequent absolute success (except for the youth narrative with its own sales totems), and with always commendable gender parity, the shelves of all the bookstores are adjusting with their alternate releases of great crime novels. , thrillers or police.
The case of Javier Castillo, the last to arrive, or at least the one that has published the fewest novels up to this moment of these four greats, aims to rise as the author par excellence of the noir genre closest to the macabre, to that line that connects with the darkness of the soul human, of the ominous, of animosity ...
The day that…, the beginning of his first novels, points to that turning point, to that moment between the tragic, the overwhelming and the disturbing sensation that evil is rampant when the human mind runs amok and surrenders to the most sinister drives.
Despite the fact that his bibliography as I say is not yet very extensive, we will increase the particular ranking of his works as they assault our bedside tables ...
Top 3 recommended novels of Javier Castillo
The crystal cuckoo
The fragility. The feeling that medicine can work the miracle of keeping body and soul together beyond the hour it marks for each one. And the notion of the invoice, of the debt contracted with destiny and with who is capable of becoming God from the barter of a heart that is already going to fall into disuse.
We have always been amazed by this idea of organic replacement, the idea that someone who leaves can be used, through a transplant, to keep someone more fortunate alive when it comes to finding the doctor, the hospital or the funds with which to reuse that fundamental part of the other person that was. From here you can always suggest suggestive stories like that movie "Seven Souls" in which Will Smith seeks his redemption through his organs...
Only, in the case of a crime novel like this one by Javier Castillo, the mystery of life becomes darker and the issue of debt exceeds unsuspected limits...
New York, 2017. Cora Merlo, a first-year medical resident, suffers a sudden heart attack that forces her to have a heart transplant. Still convalescing, the young woman is visited by a strange woman with an enigmatic offer: to spend a few days in Steelville, a small inland town, to learn about the life of her son Charles, the donor of her heart. Cora thus enters a home full of secrets, a mystery that spans twenty years and a hermetic town where, just the day she arrived, a baby disappears in a public park.
The day love was lost
One of those cases in which a continuation (not a second part), surpasses the above. After the stellar appearance of the novel The day that sanity was lost, Javier Castillo offers us this second and equally disturbing work: The day love was lost.
Once again, the title participates in that suggestive touch, between apocalyptic and evocative, between lyrical and sinister, an ambivalence that serves the narrative proposal very well. Everything that happens in the work of Javier Castillo he moves between those two waters of bad omens, of events surrounding an almost theatrical death.
A naked woman, completely beside herself, shows up at the New York FBI. A disturbing image with which the pieces of the literary puzzle are beginning to turn so that it becomes impossible for us to stop reading to discover more and more.
Sometimes Javier becomes Joel Dicker, the flashbacks are adding more and more tension to a plot that already had you won from the moment you discover that mysterious woman capable of presenting herself to the FBI as an ecce homo turned into a woman's body. that woman? What has led you to this total loss of consciousness?
Love ... Freddie Mercury said it: too much love will kill you. The day that love is lost, the consequences may be completely unpredictable. Where there was love, hatred, the desire for revenge, madness can be born.
With the frenetic rhythm of the one that already gave a good sample Javier Castillo In the previous installment, we see the world behind the eyes of Inspector Bowring, as determined to tie up loose ends as he is bewildered at each new step taken.
The naked woman was only the macabre start of a grim symphony of violence and destruction. And behind everything, love stories that seem simple, destinies and promises of eternity that are believed to be indestructible.
From what we are to the worst we can become, a single trigger causes our dark side to assume defeat as doom. Or that is what we can sometimes consider in light of the facts that are related to us ...
Everything that happened with Miranda Huff
There were days when love was lost, and sanity, and every other hint of humanity in the plots of a one-time novel. Javier Castillo already a publishing phenomenon par excellence in Spain.
A phenomenon that also already knocks on the doors of many other European countries to which these black, shocking stories are beginning to arrive, fresh from the dark waters of the wells of the genre. Javier Castillo It could belong to a generation of practically millennial black genre writers.
Young authors who assault the first sales positions in a combination of the most stark thriller with ecstatic rhythms, all around absolutely vivid characters whose destinies twists and extreme situations are glimpsed. From the outset, the disappearance of Miranda Huff evokes another illustrious recent disappearance, that of the aforementioned Dicker: the journalist Stephanie mailer. But the plot ends up dismantling the wink between the two novels.
In this novel by Javier Castillo disappearance points more to an emotional terrain in which Javier Castillo tends to express a fascinating potential for narrative tension. When Ryan arrives at the bucolic cabin away from the world, in which he tries to force a reconciliation with Miranda, his wife, he soon discovers the devastating image of blood as the only clue to a disappearance that confronts him with that maddening feeling of unreality in the face of it. Sinister.
Starting from this scene, with that rhythm that Castillo has already made great virtue of, we visualize those details, those clues in half light, those links from the past and those buried guilt in everyday life ...
Nothing is accidental, as you can guess from a suspense story. The choice of the secluded house in the forest begins to take on a more complete meaning, outlined by some wicked mind that seeks revenge or simply relishes its ominous plan. Because the house already hid other secrets before Miranda and Ryan even got there.
Evil always plans its plan like a macabre and perfect circle around a stage. Everything that happened and what happens will be suffocated by the silent forest.
Other recommended books Javier Castillo...
The day that sanity was lost
The most curious thing about this novel is how the author presents us with the most atrocious as a natural consequence, a chain of circumstances and events capable of synthesizing madness to extirpate the love that leads to pain. Come on, I don't explain myself well or anything when I want to, right? 😛
What I am trying to say is that the well-known opening image of this novel, in which a naked man walks down the street with a woman's head in his hand, finds in the development of the plot a kind of vital, existential foundation.
The macabre and monstrous of the case acquire at times an unsettling closeness in this book The Day that Sanity Was Lost. And it is that while you read you develop empathy with madness. As the psychiatrist Jenkins and Inspector Hydens delve into the case of the deranged murderer you discover how far science can be from the truth, and how far the human moves when he tries to deduce through reason.
Jenkins, Hydens and you as the reader will embark on a dark introspective journey through a trap of mirrors that tries to implicate you in the case so that you feel anxiety and doubts, so that you cannot escape from its pages until everything is firmly closed. An intriguing and fast-paced thriller constructed insanely well. A novel that emerged from self-publication and has already become a unique and notable work of all Spanish black literature.
If we have to put a but to the plot, I would cite the difficult plausibility (not even the author himself was able to address it with complete success) of some reactions such as that of Dr. Jenkins when he begins to reveal the harshest truth...
The snow girl
Like the most sinister of fate's tricks, a disappearance sows life with disturbing uncertainties and disturbing shadows. Even more so if it happens to a 3-year-old daughter. Because there is added the heavy guilt capable of devouring you.
In this novel by Javier Castillo we approach that sinvivir clinging to the slowest and darkest seconds. In this case reaching a long time that does not cure an iota. Because in other recent novels with a similar starting proposal such as «i'm not a monster", from Carmen Chaparro, the matter moves in the frenzy of the search against the clock. But in this new novel by Castillo, the matter moves to the future, pulling back those actions in search of past or future reflections.
Nothing more disturbing than discovering how out of despair prolonged for years may sprout a little hope. Only Kiera, lost at 3 years old, no longer seems to be the same girl five years later.
The arrival of the unmistakable proof of its existence after so long a time surprises everyone, even the bewildered parents who hope to be able to abandon such a long nightmare of unforeseeable consequences.
Sometimes an outside spotlight like Miren Triggs' can serve the cause of the investigation. Because Kiera is alive, no doubt. The problem is knowing her whereabouts and discovering what evil mind is capable of manifesting the parents with that cold rawness, so long later that she continues to inhabit this world, but that perhaps she no longer belongs to them ...
So Miren Triggs, a journalism student at Columbia University, is attracted to the case and initiates a parallel investigation that leads her to unravel aspects of her past that she believed were forgotten, and that is, her personal story, as well as the Kiera's, it's full of unknowns.
If the ways of the Lord are inscrutable, the labyrinthine paths to evil and hell can end up making you lose your mind in the Dantesque journey towards the truth.
The game of the soul
In times of pandemic, any approach devised by a crime novel writer or science fiction takes on new appearances of verisimilitude. In parallel, the sense of claim of the darkest arguments may magnetize us with greater intensity when the sinister looms over us as soon as we observe with full consciousness. In that of observing what happens with intensity Javier Castillo he is already a proven teacher ...
We continue on this occasion in the terrain of suspense made in Castillo, where the environment can be seen as suffocating from an already explosive start. And again a city of New York with its quality, in the hands of this author, to become a cosmopolis also of the sinister. And it is that New York never sleeps, only in the hands of Javier Castillo one after another joins in the worst imaginable nightmares ...
New York, 2011. A fifteen-year-old girl is found crucified in a suburban church on the outskirts. Miren Triggs, investigative journalist from the Manhattan press, unexpectedly receives a strange envelope. Inside, a Polaroid of a girl gagged and bound, with a single notation: «GINA PEBBLES, 2002Miren Triggs and Jim Schmoer, her former journalism teacher, will follow the trail of the girl in the photo as they investigate the New York crucifixion. Thus, they will enter a religious institution where everything is secret and they will have to decipher three questions whose answers seem impossible. What happened to Gina? Who sent the Polaroid? Are the two stories connected?
After selling more than 1.000.000 copies of his previous novels, Javier Castillo he places the pieces of a disturbing thriller on the table and introduces the reader to a dangerous game in which the most precious is wagered; a novel that plays with the dice of faith and deception, of love and pain, with strange rituals and a dark secret that, if discovered, can change everything.
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