What's Going On in South America- Gothic Horror

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude introduced me to South American literature and magical realism. According to The Guardian's Gothic becomes Latin America’s go-to genre as writers turn to the dark side this has changed:

Ayoung man follows the bloody trail of his CIA father, through Paraguayan torture chambers and the sites of Andean massacres. An Ecuadorian artist fantasizes about running a scalpel through the tongue of her mute twin. In a Buenos Aires cemetery, teenage fans devour a rock star’s rotting remains.

These grisly scenes – and many more like them – populate the pages of Latin America’s recent bestselling fiction. From the Andes to the Amazon and to the urban sprawl of some of the world’s biggest cities, a ghoulish shadow has been cast over Latin American literature.

It’s a dark departure for a region often synonymous with magical realism. Since the 1967 publication of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude the region’s writers have often lived in the shadow of Macondo, the novel’s tropical and fantastical Colombian town, decrying the expectation – usually from western editors – that they deploy the “magical realist algorithm” in their work.

Now, a new generation of writers are striking a much darker tone. They take their inspiration from the dictatorships and terrorism of the late 20th century, the poverty and violence of the region’s modern cities and the most sinister elements of the region’s rich but neglected folklore. Macondo has turned macabre.

Interesting to me, maybe to other Americans is this passage:

The current mood represents a resurgence – rather than an emergence – of horror fiction in a region long steeped in the works of Edgar Allan Poe and HP Lovecraft, said the Peruvian novelist Gustavo Faverón Patriau.

“Poe was incredibly influential in Latin America, but the renaissance of the gothic in Peru started with [leftist rebel group] the Shining Path in the 1990s. The guerrillas and the military response generated so many bloody and cruel stories that many writers felt they had to return to the language of the gothic to tell them.” 

 We never can quite get away from Edgar Allan Poe. Could it not be that we Americans may also rediscover the value of the gothic? I don't know. Poe is how I know the gothic and although I adapted his "Masque of the Red Death" into a play, I did not think I was doing so in terms of the gothic.

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