On Stars Born in Cradles of Dust, by Laura Vadillo

Review By Andreas Portillo

On the way home – Theodore Kittelson, 1905

The tradition of dark fantasy in Latin America is rich and diverse. Among the great exponents of the genre in the last century are Amparo Dávila, María Luisa Bombal, Silvina Ocampo, some stories by Borges, and others by Cortázar. When we speak of dark fantasy, we are in fact referring to a somewhat arbitrary classification that at times overlaps with horror or with the fantastic in general. Dark fantasy, which departs from certain coordinates located in our own world, stands at the antipodes of epic fantasy—of sagas, of vast worlds governed by rules different from our own. This type of fiction, with Latin American representatives such as Liliana Bodoc, Angélica Gorodischer, or Mariana Palova, deserves an article of its own. Of course, this is not a hierarchical matter.

What dark fantasy is about relates to what Tania Pleitez Vela (2024), drawing on the contributions of Rosemary Jackson and Farah Mendlesohn, calls a mode of narration. According to the latter author, these modes can be grouped into four categories. Three of them are of particular interest here: portal-quest narratives, intrusive narratives, and liminal narratives.

In portal-quest narratives, characters cross a metaphorical portal between two or more worlds. There is a normal existence in a world we recognize as our own, leading into a hidden subworld where the characters must accomplish something and then (not always) return to ours. In intrusive narratives, it is within our world that the supernatural or impossible filters in, causing disorder—the conflict that must be overcome and the initial state of affairs restored. In liminal narratives, the world is recognizable, but things become strange in such a way that neither the boundaries nor the facts themselves are clearly supernatural; doubt and uncertainty prevail. These last two modes largely coincide with what has also been categorized as weird fiction. Of course, these are ideal types, and dark fantasy stories tend to combine several of these specific narrative modes.

Some contemporary Latin American writers working with the categories developed by Tania in her article and with the boundaries between the fantastic and horror include Samanta Schweblin, María Fernanda Ampuero, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Along this path, Salvadoran dark fantasy has representatives such as Claudia Hernández, with her trilogy of urban and cosmopolitan stories (Mediodía de frontera, Otras ciudades, Olvida uno) and her more mystical and symbolist vein (La canción del mar); Jacinta Escudos (El diablo sabe mi nombre); Álvaro Menen Desleal, who rewrites Borges throughout much of his work; Jorge Galán (La habitación al fondo de la casa); surprisingly, a couple of stories by Horacio Castellanos Moya (Amaranta, Torceduras); and the stories of Pedro Romero Irula (La llegada del mundo invisible).

The stories in Stars Born in Cradles of Dust by Laura Vadillo can be situated within this tradition of Latin American and Salvadoran writers, as well as within what Pleitez, Jackson, and Mendlesohn identify as a particular mode of narration.

The book contains eight stories, each ranging between ten and twelve pages in length. This is already a major strength and something that places Laura on a different plane, outside the safe territory often chosen by novice writers: the micro-story. This subgenre strikes our country like a winter that lasts longer than usual, depriving us of true narrative universes and projects by offering scenes, snapshots, little paragraphs, and supposed attempts at clever stories that leave the reader emptier than ever and deeply dissatisfied.

Laura does not fear length nor the tension between tenderness and darkness, desire and hostility, the life drive and the death drive that surface in each of her texts. At the same time, she commits to a certain universality in her stories without ceasing to be profoundly Salvadoran. One example is the first story: “It’s All the Ants’ Fault.” In this liminal story, an upper-middle-class housewife lives an apparently idyllic life and eagerly awaits celebrating her wedding anniversary with her husband. Soon, the ants and the protagonist’s mental deterioration reveal what she (and Salvadoran society) has attempted to repress: the deep violence of the sexual division of labor, unpaid domestic work, and the protagonist’s lack of independence (economic, existential, spiritual) as she remains trapped in a traditional marriage still promoted today as desirable by the far right worldwide.

“The King of the Clouds,” on the other hand, is an apparently portal-quest story in which a girl ascends from the hellish traffic of a suffocating metropolis to the realm of the clouds, where she engages in a conversation with an enigmatic being. As it unfolds, the story shifts into a liminal mode, with a resolution open to multiple interpretations.

The next story, “Yesterdays,” is somewhat more direct and darker: a teenager encounters a magical pill that allows him to relive memories and indulge in the virtuality of decisions not taken in the timelines that closed when he made his original choice. This seemingly simple story, dealing with a theme exhausted by hundreds of writers and Hollywood productions, in fact possesses great depth and originality. Not only does it update the trope of parallel realities and universes, addiction, depression, and the idealization of the past, but its protagonist is a young adult—lonely, paralyzed, and lacking the tools to face life. In a sense, it is a story about a broad segment of humanity that, in this last quarter-century, has experienced phenomena such as addiction to instant gratification, the loss of horizons, or isolation. This has been scarcely addressed in national literature.

“The Body of Susana” is perhaps the most enigmatic story, a portal-quest narrative in which things apparently go wrong. The protagonist, once again, is a girl who encounters a supernatural entity. In this case, the entity is trapped in a tree. The protagonist, who has always hated the prison of the flesh—the entropy to which all living beings and the universe itself must submit according to the second law of thermodynamics, corporeality and its norms and limitations—begins to leave it her organs until she becomes something new. Consciously or unconsciously, the story connects with major currents of thought of our time, such as extinctionism, which advocates the voluntary and gradual extinction of humankind to save the planet and non-human beings from destruction; transhumanism, which proposes that one day we will be able to abandon our organic bodies and replicate the contents of our brains in electronic transistors; and antinatalism, which argues that bringing children into the world is the most violent act one can commit, as it involuntarily condemns someone to a life of suffering, illness, and death—inevitable realities according to both ancient religions and modern science.

In “Divine Comedy” and “Omen of Death,” the thanatic theme predominates. Laura demonstrates that she does not shy away from any of the Great Themes of the human condition. The first may be the least original in the collection, functioning as a kind of ultramodern homage to Dante’s classic. The second, however—an intrusive narrative—contains two brilliant fantastic elements: a man who can transform into a wild animal attempts to deceive death. The reiteration of the legend of the nahuales and the archetypal story of the inevitability of death embodied in an anthropoid form that knocks on a protagonist’s door, as independent tales, might have fallen flat.

“The Highway” is another liminal story, cryptic and symbolic, in which the themes of loneliness and lack of communication predominate. It is perhaps the one most aligned with the weird from the outset. It also shares points of contact with El buey by Claudia Hernández, the disturbing series From by John Griffin, and the absurdity of “The Southern Thruway” by Julio Cortázar. In some sense, it is also a ghost story—about how terrifying eternity can be, about the intergenerational trauma of a country like ours, about all the anonymous victims forgotten by History.

“The Doctor and the Devil” delves into the theme of suffering. It is a non-traditional portal-quest narrative in which a doctor, serving the torturers and jailers of a demon, must heal its wounds so that they may continue torturing it ad infinitum. Of course, we soon realize that the demon possesses a certain human dimension, depth, and sensitivity, while the doctor questions whether he retains those qualities by serving an institution that does not seek to alleviate pain, but rather the opposite: to make prisoners suffer as an end in itself. It is a story of great power, and, had it been more situated and stripped of certain predictable elements, it might have become a classic of our fiction.

The book’s language is very well crafted and polished. However, at times there are stock phrases, commonplaces, and clichés, suggesting a certain indecision regarding the narrative register chosen. There is a tension between the language used in Young Adult fiction—novels and stories aimed at a readership still in formation—and serious, adult literary language, without concessions or constraints imposed by the straitjacket of marketing. Another manifestation of this tension lies in the illustrations accompanying the texts. On one hand, they offer a particular interpretation of the stories, valuable in itself; on the other, they underestimate the reader’s imagination—what the reader might arrive at independently.

It is a valuable and unusual literary debut, with both strengths and flaws. Hopefully many more people will be encouraged to read it, and Laura will continue writing. National literature needs both readers and writers with this level of ambition.

Estrellas que nacen en cunas de polvo, Laura Vadillo, Editorial Ojo de Cuervo, 122 pages.  

References

Pleitez Vela, T. (2024). “Avatares emocionales, el acto escritural y condiciones adversas. Dos cuentos fantásticos: Horacio Castellanos Moya y Claudia Hernández” Orillas. Rivista d’Ispanistica, (13), 1–22.