La current Canadian literature has a female voice. And it is also about a diverse voice that, in each of its great representatives, ends up addressing everything. From the most sophisticated literature of Margarte atwood, the exploration of the story and the narrative as great values of the universal narrative in the Nobel Prize Alice Munro and the approach to the currently most popular genres such as suspense and noir through a masterful Shari Lapena. Without a doubt an essential triumvirate in our days for greater glory of the great country of the northernmost America.
Focusing on Shari Lapena, we discover a great of suspense made in her hands a psychological thriller that always maintains a tension from close aspects, achieving that mimicry of fear that every reader of this genre seeks above all else.
The Shari Lapena beginnings they did not point to this genre. But the truth is that the arrival of his work in Spain stems from his suspense novel "The Couple Next Door", a successful shuttle that, thanks to the overwhelming general reception, has made possible the arrival of his next two novels.
When you sit in your little corner to read, or lie on the bed with the book in your hands, or take advantage of those dead moments in public transport, you are automatically trapped by that psychological tension that shakes each character like an electric current, to every situation.
Shari Lapena plays with her characters and by extension with us readers. To read Shari Lapena is to rediscover those details of the everyday that can suddenly be obscured by blowing up our minimal bases, those spaces of trust necessary to sustain the normality of our world. And the effect is simply fascinating, unsettling to the maximum degree. Entertainment reading made existential earthquake ...
Top 3 recommended books by Shari Lapena
A not so happy family
In the muddy terrain of appearances, the family on the verge of collapse happens to be the happiest in the world. While she seems to make out-of-doors arguments a bit of a habit, she appeases the ghosts of her. There are not a few who find their house small and take it upon themselves to analyze that of others. Hence, many families take to the streets on the defensive, with their appearance of everything in order while the sword held by a thread about to give way with everything.
Shari Lapena takes that idea and maximizes it to the limits of reason, where loves, passions and hates fly above the familiar with their variable shadows that hide and reveal secrets and mysteries. In the end, everything is known in the family... Because the least expected day the woman goes down to clean the basement where the body is hidden or the man finds the remains of an unimaginable homicide among the old boxes. The point is that killing, having patrimonial issues involved, brings us all closer to those old Cainite grudges...
The quiet and luxurious neighborhood of Brecken Hill wakes up in shock. Only the very wealthy can afford a home here and there are few fortunes greater than that of Fred and Sheila Merton. But all the money in the world can't protect them when death knocks on their door. The Mertons have been found brutally murdered after a tense dinner with their three children. Who, of course, are devastated. Or maybe not?
The couple next door
The neighbors invite you to dinner. The typical fellowship dinner for newcomers to the neighborhood. You and your partner hesitate to go. You have run out of the usual babysitter and you have no one to turn to. It occurs to you that being a dinner in the house next door…, you could well go with the electronic monitor and make a round of the house every little while.
Marco ended up convincing Anne and they did. At the end of the evening, when they return home, the girl is not there. In addition to the corresponding panic, the feeling of guilt emerges. From Marco for convincing Anne, from Anne for succumbing to Marco's idea, from the neighbor for asking them not to go with the baby, from Anne for feeling those feelings of detachment for her newborn daughter.
But panic overwhelms everything. The only objective is to find the girl. Knowing what happened, putting aside that fateful feeling about a possible and macabre ending for a little person like her. The intensity of this thriller lies in all these nuances. To which we are adding the need to know what happens among so many shadows that are spread over all the characters
In a way there are predictable aspects. But it seems more like a pretense engineered by Shari Lapena so that you trust yourself as a reader and succumb to a greater degree to the final impact, to the twist that is born of the evidence revealed in the middle of the book.
A choral crime novel, where those shadows of the characters lead us to their pasts, to their possible motivations, to the ultimate truth of their souls. Psychology of unique characters to empathize with in order to understand the rugged and macabre of the girl's disappearance. The police will look for clues here and there. And I repeat that you will be able to check how the resolution of the case is seen to arrive. But don't trust yourself, you have a lot to know and discover in this story ...
A stranger at home
From Shari Lapena we already expect one of those great literary constructions of suspense, a domestic thriller like the one she showed us in The Couple Next Door. And certainly in this book A stranger at home The Canadian writer reissues that formula of fear hovering over the close with the laudable intention of the most difficult yet.
On some occasion I have heard doctors and specialists between the neuronal and the psychological say that losing memory in an accident can be a product of the physical trauma itself or a consequence of emotional trauma.
Considering that ability of our psyche to decompose a reality that has suddenly violated us causing us intense harm, it is not surprising that Karen navigates the misty terrain of her mind after hitting the road with a car.
But is it the accident or is her amnesia a defense mechanism for something else, another unfinished business that she seems to sense through the fog of her present? Her husband Tom is happy to get his wife back in what could have been a fatal accident. Too much speed, why was he going so fast? Where was he going? What was he running from? or it was just that she was late for an appointment. These are not questions that Tom asks himself...
It is rather Karen herself who wants to know. She needs to know what has happened to her and her own mind only shows her empty answers, like those treacherous evocations of something that you know is important but that you cannot lift from the well of the mind. Because, despite everything, despite the happiness of knowing she is alive after a fatal car accident, something creaks in that reality to which she has returned.
Karen believes that the concussion will eventually give way to light, but she also knows that she may not have as much time and doubts whether to wait for the moment to find out or whether she considers it imperative to flee again without still knowing why.
The mind can go through its own twists and turns, but sometimes the survival instinct simply depends on the physical, on the cellular. Fear is embedded in many parts of the body, like an alarm system in case reason fails.
Other recommended books by Shari Lapena…
Everyone lies here
Emulating Darío Fo in that theatrical delirium of “No one pays here,” Shari Lapena points to confusion as an argument. Only in his case the issue is moved to less humorous and parodic spaces. Because appearances can be a reason for narrative mockery that exposes moral and social miseries, or it can be a darker tool to hide dark truths...
William Wooler is, at first glance, a devoted father and husband. But he has been having an affair that that same afternoon had a horrible end in a suburban motel. When he returns home, devastated and angry, he is shocked to see that Avery, his nine-year-old daughter, has left school early and loses her temper.
Hours later, Avery's family reports his disappearance. Suddenly, Stanhope doesn't seem like such a peaceful neighborhood anymore. And William is not the only one hiding a lie. As witnesses come forward with information, which may or may not be true, about the disappearance, Avery's neighbors become increasingly unhinged.
An unexpected guest
When Shari Lapena stormed the literary market, just a few years ago, we were introduced to an author with her particular stamp of domestic thrillers, halfway between the cinematographic of the rear window of Alfred Hitchcock, and even touching that reading tension of great novels like Misery and the shining, of Stephen King.
It is about looking for the imbalance in the comfort zone, redrawing those scenarios of kind meanings such as home and security, to open ourselves to assumptions that shake the foundations of our consciousness. Because if the known, if the people from our inner circles present themselves to us as strangers of whom we do not know everything, the suspense is assured.
It is not surprising then that the novel The Couple Next Door, with which Lapena traveled from Canada to the rest of the world, reaches that label of a domestic thriller in which the shadows of suspicion suddenly loom over a world built from the subjectivity of the protagonists.
Characters who need to escape their normal patterns in order to peer into the crudest truth that has come to destabilize everything. Recently I read about the conception of home, about what each of us consider to be our home, from the symbolic conquest of a brush from teeth in the bathroom to setting up the home around the family.
There are those who make each hotel their home, for work imperatives or for any other circumstances. It's just that a hotel is ultimately inhabited by strangers who are shared life with in the hallways or at the breakfast buffet.
The Mitchell's Inn hotel is that bucolic place away from the madding crowd where each new guest comes to heal wounds or to charge batteries, to find himself or someone who should never belong to his official life. A temporary home for restless consciences ...
Telling a story of suspense in the surroundings of a hotel necessarily evokes Agatha Christie. And certainly this novel offers an approach that links with that great writer. And then the question arises as to whether Lapena will be up to the task... The storm arrives at the place with that noséqué telluric and of the elements that already awakens our most atavistic alert.
The hotel loses electricity and the darkness becomes the perfect ally for that dark side of some of the guests who, having come there to purge sins, to find rest or to carry out some marital deception, may be pushed to his darkest impulses or find the perfect environment for his revenge. A story that, although part of an already probed plot, is capable of keeping us tied to the plot.
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