Everything that is labeled "gothic" creates a contradictory feeling for me at first. I have found works with that setting that have fascinated me and others that have seemed like a mess. Both in the cinema and in literature. Especially the gothic narrative has given for many derivations more than gothic, churrigeresque.
And it is that in the end what prevails, as almost always is the gift, the genius, the creativity adjusted to the creative intention. In this case, with the indicated label announced by the publisher, we enter a truly Gothic setting but without fanfare, a crime novel with that point of fantasy around terror itself that is fully convincing and fortunate, for my taste, of course.
It was the year 1854 in Barcelona. The inert body of a maiden appears next to a well, famous for the myths that hang over it. Since the death of «the lady of the well»Which gives this novel its title, there are other new murders of a similar caliber. The gloomy atmosphere is complemented as we advance in the story with an interesting fantasy that fits perfectly with the nineteenth-century imaginary of the town, still immersed in the esoteric as a point prior to the incipient modernity.
And without a doubt we are moving in a passionate gothic terror. Masterfully led by the author through magical settings. Characters such as Octavio Reigosa, who investigates cases always relying on empiricism and reason, or Andreu Palafox, the typical inventor with his halo of magic that alternates science, a special gift with a point of trickery, capable of presenting inventions that resemble to human life ... well, that characters like these confer that magical aspect to the gloomy and that redraw deaths, murders, with bewitching touches of fascination on an end of life blurred between the fantastic.
You can buy the book The lady of the well, the new novel by Daniel Sánchez Pardos, here: