With “A dead cat” (Minotaur), an intriguing, terrifying story of Guillermo Martínez, a prestigious publishing label is recovered. Short story writer, novelist, doctor in Mathematical Sciences, Martinez He has become internationally recognized for his works and the films that emerged from them. We dialogue with him.
Journalist: What is the reason for the current interest in horror literature?
Guillermo Martínez: Sometimes there is a resurgence of some themes, genres, atmospheres. Years ago it happened with the topic of vampirism and before that, due to the impact of “The Da Vinci Code”, with the novels that had to do with religions and sects. I’m not sure how much the predominance of one gender is over the other. I think several coexist at the same time. Without a doubt, Mariana Enriquez’s success with “Our Part of the Night” contributed to illuminating that world. But, at the same time, the new weird is in fashion, the new strange literature, which is not exactly gothic. It seems to me that the two worlds in which literary currents currently move are that of autofiction, with the realistic experience of intimate life, and that of a literature of imagination that ranges from gothic, police, science fiction to the new weird.
Q.: Don’t you consider that this has to do with “the spirit of the time”, the “zeitgeist”?
GM: Without a doubt, ideas of fascism are seen resurfacing. It is in the light of day what until not long ago was clearly embarrassing. The pride of being on the right returned, with all the imaginable setbacks that that can have. Extreme individualism is promoted where if you did not make a place for yourself in the world it is because you did not work hard enough. It is the idea of the exploitation of oneself in pursuit of capitalism. There are currently a number of people, like never seen before, who are giving away their work, for the content they put on the networks. Free content, which is waiting to reach hundreds of thousands of followers to eventually earn some money. This personal hyperproduction contributes to that pyramidal illusion of capitalism that everyone can achieve it. Well, not all, only a tiny part can achieve that number of followers and be paid in relation to what they worked for. There is an evident exacerbation of individualism that is manifested by handing over an important part of life to a screen, an absolutely solipsistic activity.
Q.: With “A Dead Cat” are you returning to the stories of your beginnings?
GM: The stories always gave me the opportunity to try out several different registers. It is for me the favorite field of imagination. In the novel one is tied to the world of the machinery that he sets in motion and which he has to attend to for several years. The story allows you to jump from one genre to another. In mine there is the family, erotic, political or mad world. In “The Dead Cat” there is a tension, as in several of my stories and novels, between a supernatural explanation linked to superstition – in this case the belief in the effects of a curse – and a rational explanation that observes the facts in terms from the real world.
Q.: What did it feel like to reopen Minotauro, a collection that was a milestone in the national publishing world?
GM: Pride and emotion. For me, the Minotauro collection has something endearing. They were the books that my dad collected, he really liked them, with works by Bradbury, Ballard, Burgess, Philip K. Dick, Fredric Brown. I read them at my house in Bahía Blanca. Added to this is the honor of inaugurating this collection in Argentina, it is already in Spain, and that the illustrator is Santiago Caruso, a visual artist with extensive experience as a book illustrator.
Q: What are you up to now?
GM: In a novel between police and espionage, a bit like those of Patricia Highsmith. It’s the diary of a guy who is given a mission to kill someone and is trying to decide if he’s going to do it or not. As co-writer, at the request of Natalia Meta, in a film that takes place in Oxford. And “A Dead Cat” has sold the rights to the producers of “When Evil Stalks.”
Source: Ambito
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