Juan Herranz ›Blog of Juan Herranz

Mr Mercedes, from Stephen King

28/01/2020

When retired police officer Hodges receives a letter from the mass murderer who took the lives of dozens of people, without ever having been arrested, he knows that it is undoubtedly him. It's no joke, that psychopath throws him that letter of introduction and ...

The Old Mermaid, by José Luis Sampedro

28/01/2020

This masterpiece by José Luis Sampedro is a novel that everyone should read at least once in their life, as they say for important things. Each character, starting with the woman who centralizes the novel and who happens to be called under various names ...

The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair, by Joël Dicker

18/12/2020

The ultimate truth of the matter is that hook, this Joel Dicker story hook. And that sometimes, while reading such an extensive novel, you wonder if knowing the investigation into the past case of the murder of Nola Kellergan can give as much of itself as for ...

22/11/63, of Stephen King

23/01/2024

Stephen King He manages at will the virtue of turning any story, no matter how improbable, into a close and surprising plot. Its main trick lies in the profiles of characters whose thoughts and behaviors it knows how to make our own, no matter how strange and/or macabre they may be. In this …

Big Fish by Tim Burton

23/01/2024

My favorite of all Tim Burton's. Which is saying something... A son, now an adult, returns home to accompany his father in her last hours. William, the son in question, is newly married and has grown up as a practical, responsible guy, very far from...

The invisible guardian, of Dolores Redondo

28/01/2020

Amaia Salazar is a police inspector who returns to her hometown of Elizondo to try to solve a lurid serial murder case. Teenage girls in the area are the killer's main target. As the plot progresses, we discover Amaia's dark past, the same as the ...

Life of Pi, by Yann Martel

28/01/2020

Everything. The past with its good and bad memories, with guilt and frustration ... but also the future with its hopes, its destiny to write and pending wishes. Everything is concentrated in the present when the tragedy appears near. Being shipwrecked in an ocean kills you or you ...

The impatient alchemist, from Lorenzo Silva

28/01/2020

Nadal Award of the year 2000. This crime novel penetrates the case of a mysterious death in a roadside motel room. There is no apparent blood or violence. But the shadow of suspicion provokes the pertinent investigation, in charge of Sergeant Bevilacqua and the Chamorro guard. ...

The weakness of the Bolshevik, of Lorenzo Silva

27/01/2020

Chance as the only justification to fix an insane obsession. Disenchantment, boredom, and animosity can turn a person into a potential murderer. Envy for being what others have become, and that the protagonist of this story will never be, grows and ...

Lost generation

23/01/2024

We were wrong. What are you going to do. But we did it on purpose. They called us the lost generation because we never wanted to win. We agree to lose even before we have played. We were defeatists, fatalists; we fell into the easy descensus averni Of all the vices we spend our lives on We never got old or decadent, we were always so alive… and so dead.

We only talked about today because it was what we had left, a whole immense today of youth, vitality and banished dreams, exhausted, extirpated with drug surgery. Today was another day to burn in the rapid burning of life. Your life, my life, it was just a matter of time to burn like sheets of a frenzied calendar.

Story within another story

21/03/2017

An endless loop. A beautiful decorative motif for the patio of what was a synagogue, resurrected centuries later as a rural house, called: «Virila's dream».

When I decided on the name of my novel: «El sueño del santo», I was curious to find this coincidence on the internet. The whole for the part, a synecdoche to speak of the same character, Saint Virila, and his dream towards a mystical experience, a kind of rehearsal for eternity.

At the presentation of the novel in Sos del Rey Católico, I chatted with Farnés, the person in charge, together with Javier, of rehabilitating the old synagogue and filling those centuries-old intramural walls with passing souls who can stay and enjoy the beautiful town of Sos del Rey Católico.

Fresh Banking

23/01/2024

The winter of the economy has arrived. Mattresses are once again sheltering people's savings, relying more on prosperous dreams than on the promises of 5% from mutual funds. It is no wonder, every day we see how banks study each other with the suspicious look of Clint Eastwood in "The Good, the Ugly and the Bad."