A mutant and anthropophagic house, a dystopian family that turns it into a hotel, guests and boarders, and the sinister surrounding everything in “The third aberration” (Culture Fund) intimidating and addictive novel where Hoary Flower makes the weird his own again. Gray-haired She is a narrator, screenwriter, professor in Social Sciences (UBA). with his novel “Lolas” won the El Cuervo editorial novel award, from Bolivia, and with “The second mother tongue” the Celsius award from the Black Week of Gijón, Spain.
Journalist: A dysfunctional family, in times of the dictatorship, converts a mansion into a hotel. What led her to discover the strange, the sinister, the terror there?
Hoary Flower: During the pandemic I wanted to work in a strange space and I remembered a neighborhood hotel I had once visited. I thought that those who manage it could not be impersonal owners but rather a family that will form and manage it. At the same time, I had the concern of writing a ghost novel that would dialogue with the Gothic genre, with haunted houses, and the natural relationship arose with the great ghost, the great Argentine trauma of the 20th century, the disappeared. I couldn’t tell another ghost story without them being present.
CF: It has to do with my professional training. I come from cinema, I am a screenwriter and editor. And that is in the construction and assembly of the work, which is quite choral. At first I thought I would tell the family’s story in an orderly manner, then I understood that I needed another narrative pulse. He had a hotel run by a large family, with several guests, where Sergio arrives and triggers the action. Plus, there are the neighbors. So I had to open the story, establish tension and turning points, manage the story so that it had strong moments all the time.
Q.: The hotel has the aberration that its architecture mutates from time to time, installing the novel between the fantastic and the wonderful.
CF: I wanted to work within the sinister, the fantastic, the strange and the wonderful, that everything was disturbing, the architecture, the family, the real history of Argentina. The family’s children, Diana, Apollo, Minerva, and Aphrodite, who disappeared in a mutation of the house. They tell me that they are kids with powers, no, they are not powers, they are conditions anchored in reality. I wanted the sinister and the fantastic not to be only in the story, but to permeate the characters.
Q.: “The Third Aberration” has a forceful conclusion, but leaves open spaces and a speculative ending.
CF: I don’t like leaving closed endings, I work with ambiguity. The novel, the house, can be read as an allegory of unfinished issues in our history. He talks about the mutations that the country suffers from time to time. Although it has levels of allegory, the ending can be completed according to expectations, and has already given rise to many interpretations.
Q.: Does this novel open a new stage in your literature, begun with “Lolas” and “Bolas” where you mix the fantastic with comedy?
CF: “Lolas”, the story of a divorcee, is one hundred percent realistic, and pop, and cinematic, almost a Netflix comedy-drama. “Bolas” incorporates the fantastic: one morning the protagonist wakes up without testicles and has to discover what the universe wants to tell him because of that. With those novels I closed my realistic stage. I began to explore other terrains with “Pulpa”, a dystopian novel, and with “Los Accidentos Geographicos”, a novel about the bonds of a couple in multiverses. What would happen if the same couple met in different conditions and different geographical locations. It plays with the idea of the doppelgänger, of the double: they come to meet themselves, their other versions. My first stage was realistic, then I delved into weird or strange fiction, as I like to call it.
Q: “The Second Mother Language” is science fiction?
CF: It is inscribed in cyberpunk, family drama and dystopia. The interweaving of genres characterizes the new strange fiction.
Q.: Why do many writers in Latin America today develop their work within cyberpunk or weird?
CF: Latin America is an unstable region, and that means that instability in genders is also being explored. We seek to dialogue with our traditions because we are indebted to Borges, Bioy, Cortázar. We find in the genres considered minor a way of expressing instability. There is a certain non-conformity of not sticking to a single key when we write, we take from all genres what we need to tell a story.
Q: What authors working within your genre interest you?
CF: I really like what Samanta Schweblin, Juan Mattio, Ramiro Sanchíz do. For a couple of years with Juan Mattio we were co-editors of the collection Ficción Extraña from the publishing house Indómita Luz. While realism and the literature of the self are still there, the movement is towards the strangest literatures and genres. Independent of phenomena like Mariana Enriquez. and Luciano Lamberti. Strange fiction, due to its projection to the public, is the literature of the present.
Q: What did it feel like to go from medium-sized publishers to a large one?
CF: An honor. Previously he had published with independent and medium-sized publishers such as Obloshka, and with Indómita Luz and Zonas Borde, small, with limited print runs. Fondo de Cultura, which in the Tierra Firme collection has outstanding authors, opens me to new readers through federal distribution, reaching all provinces, Latin American countries and Spain.
Q: What are you writing now?
CF: I have a couple of finished novels that move within the same logic of strange fiction, horror, a certain cruel realism, the disturbing and the sinister. For its part, my novel “Lolas” has been about to hit the screen for a long time, now the project is for both a film and a series. There is also the film project of my novel for children “How I Became a Witch”.
Source: Ambito
I am an author and journalist who has worked in the entertainment industry for over a decade. I currently work as a news editor at a major news website, and my focus is on covering the latest trends in entertainment. I also write occasional pieces for other outlets, and have authored two books about the entertainment industry.
