Simón López Trujillo's 'mind-blowing' (Gabriela Cabezón Cámara) debut takes readers into a dry
and degraded fire-prone landscape where humanity has encroached a step too far into the
natural world and a deadly fungus mounts its own resistance. In the disorienting
devastatingly tense world of López Trujillo a eucalyptus farm worker named Pedro starts
coughing. Several of his coworkers die of a strange fungal disease which has jumped to humans
for the first time but Pedro miraculously awakes. His survival fascinates a foreign
mycologist as well as a local priest who dubs his mysterious mutterings to be the words of a
prophet. Meanwhile Pedro's kids are left to fend for themselves: the young Cata whose creepy
art projects are getting harder and harder to decipher and Patricio who wasn't ready to be
thrust into the role of father. Their competing efforts to reckon with Pedro's condition
eventually meet in a horrifying climax that readers will never forget. For readers of Jeff
VanderMeer and Samanta Schweblin López Trujillo is a next-generation Bolaño with a fresh
speculative edge and a mind that's always one step ahead of us.
