When one has been hardened in the first novels of Stephen King, those filled with terror that he wrote in the prolific 80s, finding a good horror novel today is not an easy task. But the young author Malenka Ramos, skillfully approaches that knowing how to narrate between the darkest recesses of the soul.
What caught my attention the most before getting to this book was that resemblance to my childhood or early adolescence (Yes, in 1987, the year in which everything began, I was already 12 years old). I do not know now, but in the past, in that diffuse border between childhood and maturity, young people approached the dark, the esoteric and the ghostly, the unknown and ultimately fear with that insane curiosity to encompass everything in a world yet to be discovered in its most internal mechanisms.
At book What lives inside, some children approach the Camelle house, a large abandoned house with its usual mythology around it. And what was only intended to be a moment of surrender to fear, between laughter, surprises and emotions, little by little becomes a journey of no return towards evil in essence.
That witch's night in 1987, the children of San Petri who ventured to visit the house will be magnetized by the evil that haunts them. Years later, the memory of that infernal encounter is shared by the former children as an unwanted memory that everyone tries to erase with greater or lesser success. Evil coexisted with all of them, stalking them in the dark through Bunny's hands, like a deformed reflection of a childhood rabbit that lives in his dreams, turning them into nightmares.
One bad day he decides to undertake some work on the old house. Those affected in the first instance are all those children of 1987, adults of today who will return to those half-erased memories, who will relive their nightmares. Maturity gives them a reason with which to try to find the reasons for that evil that has them infected, to try to undertake the necessary fight against darkness from the light. A battle in which it will not always be easy to survive.
You can buy the book What lives inside, the latest novel by Malenka Ramos, here: