Spanish weird fiction (seeking recommendations)

M

Malone

Grimscribe
I'm wondering is there any (particularly material contemporaneous with the French Decadent era), and has any of it been translated into English, useless monoglot that I am. Thanks in advance.
 
A lot of the Weird written in spanish doesn't get categorized as such, because of Borges & because of the blight of magical realism (which is really a kind of Weird-Lite, let's face it). But it doesn't get a lot weirder than the stories of Julio Cortazár, i think. Borges himself, of course, basically writes weird tales. Some of Roberto Bolano's short pieces come recommended, weird or not. One of them, an essay, a rant, really, is titled "Mitos de Cthulhu" and is a merciless takedown of commercial Spanish literature. Read 2666. It's not weird, but it's relentlessly dark.
Alphonse Bécquer is a Spanish Poe/Victor Hugo type figure, wrote a bunch of ghost stories, not too decadent, more romantic i guess.
Well, sorry for basically not answering your question...
 
Not necessarily weird, but certainly dark, paranoid and obsessive:
Adolfo Bioy Casares' Morel's Invention is a masterpiece.
 
Morel's Invention is indeed a masterpiece. I agree about Horacio Quiroga.

I also recommend The Seven Madmen and The Flame-Throwers by Roberto Arlt and Report on the Blind, part of the novel On Heroes and Tombs, by Ernesto Sábato.
 
Oh, of course. Bioy Casares, la invencion de Morel, which i am in the middle of rereading, in fact. Don't know how i forgot.
 
Ramón del Valle-Inclan might be worth looking at - decadent and strange rather than weird - see Autumn and Winter Sonatas (Dedalus): 'decadent in every sense of the word - interweaves death, sex and religion... these are novellas built on shifting ground - the erotic moves between the grotesque, the beautiful, the absurd - and that is precisely what gives them their strange, potent charm' (back cover blurb)
 
Consecrated authors like Francisco Tario, Amparo Davila and Juan Jose Arreola.

Most recent authors like Alberto Chimal, Bernardo Esquinca, Luis Jorge Boone and Mauricio Montiel Figueiras
 
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José Donoso wrote an incredibly dark magical realist novel called The Obscene Bird of Night. It's fantastic.
 
Virgilio Pinera. As with Aickman, Pinera soured me on most of what I would read later because he was already at the apex. Unlike Aickman, his sense of the absurd and uncanny is not measured and drawn out, but rather carried through every frenetic moment. I hesitate to even say that the man tried to encapsulate any sort of spiritual unease or discontent. Like Abe or Urmuz, it reads as though he simply felt life was a ridiculous experience. I read Cold Tales at least twice a year. Borges and Bioy Cesares loved him from what I've gathered.
 
Thanks for all the recommendations.

Shear said:
Virgilio Pinera. As with Aickman, Pinera soured me on most of what I would read later because he was already at the apex.
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My experience with Aickman has been the same, especially when it comes to consistency. Most of the other great ghostly writers only have a few masterpieces in comparison or lost steam over time.
 
Don't really have much to add to what's been mentioned so far. In Spanish (well, in México, at least, which is what I'm familiar with) we don't really have a weird literary tradition, or even a horror one per se, despite the abundance of macabre imagery in Mexican tradition. Truth be told, not a lot of people are in tune with said tradition, and some even mock or despise it because foreing culture (or what passes for it) is so much more attractive.

So proper horror authors tend to be few and far between. What we do have, however, is writers, including some big names like Octavio Paz, who ended up writing one or a few stories that could be classified as horror/weird fiction, while it was never their intention to be known as genre writers. (Paz wrote a creepy ltitle tale titled "the blue bouquet", by the way.)

I'll come back to this thread later with, I hope, suggestions of specific stories to look for, plus some more authors I don't know have been translated or not. Gotta look into that.
 
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Leopoldo Lugones, though I've only read a couple of his stories for now. But one in particular is an specially impressive piece of weird fiction.

And plenty of Borges can be considered weird fiction (including his homage to Lovecraft "There are More Things"
 
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