If Cortázar was right and the story wins by knockout, while the novel wins by points, José Luis Cáceres (Quito, 1982) gave us a beating. His latest book, Internal weight (El Conejo, 2023) solidifies the career of a storyteller who built himself in the field of black fiction. There are eight stories in which alchemical writing allows the Ecuadorian horror, even bloodier in these times, to become a convenient excuse to hold a dialogue with Edgar Allan Poe and HP Lovecraft, among other cultists of the genre. This book explores the urgency of recognizing him as one of the most powerful voices in the Ecuadorian story.

Quito by José Luis Cáceres is a place where crimes and violence attract the complexity of the human soul: from the former Torres de Almagro in the making, from the elegant and dirty north, to the most remote places in the south, where life has the intensity of legend, it is possible to reconstruct the journey of hate and love that lie at the bottom of the city, like a sewer network. Journalists, as it cannot be otherwise, play their most typical confused and delirious role, while police and judicial officials embody the state, which is always without resources and corrupt.

In fact, some of the stories are brutally harsh and show the extreme violence that children can endure. Although, on the other hand, in the aesthetic proposal of José Luis, there is also room for thinking about that complex, and already repetitive, literary character that was Juan Fernando Hermosa, the “child of terror”, as a frenetic evolution of a disintegrated society… It seems to me, however, , that the methodical subtlety with which this writing recreates those scenes has less to do with blood than with the pleasure of philosophical reflection.

And José Luis, in addition to being a storyteller, is also a lawyer. Maybe that’s why with the knowledge of facts, without love and gray eyes, like the best Vargas Llosa, he knew how to deal with judicial labyrinths and the cruelty of the streets. Perhaps it is precisely because of this absence of possible justice that superheroes make sense in this literature. Not necessarily those from the classic comics, but others like Luchito Anda, a poet who aspires, at the same time, to be Borges’ Juan Dahlmann and Yukio Mishima himself.

Today, when the existence of the alleged Andean Gothic is discussed, Cáceres’ contribution is not considered with sufficient seriousness. Although he was able to tell the revenge and gruesome games of childhood, as well as the crimes of the city, with enough power to aesthetically elevate the world, full of signs and mysteries. A writer who also has the power of laughter, for example, when he caricatures politicians, that domestic fauna so full of contradictions and inconsistencies. It is necessary to read this author of five books of short stories, a novel and several anthologies. Interior Weight, in particular, is a dedication to that literature which, by showing us horror, restores our capacity for wonder. (OR)