Another Reality - Through the Night Like a Snake: Latin American Horror Stories

There are books on this Earth, which can take you away - not so much into another world than rather into another reality. You know that place exists, only it is different from where you are, they do things differently, the history is another, and the horrors, though similar in nature, are different there too. In ten stories from various Latin American countries, Through the Night Like a Snake: Latin American Horror Stories takes you into such a different reality where it’s nothing astounding to have a vulture as neighbor, where you can see the ghost of a serial killer, where supernatural, extraterrestrial beings are among us, in our houses, in our gardens, and where the haunting remnants of Nazism brought here from far away mesh with cults and communes and reign in terror.

The arrangement of stories within an anthology is just as significant as the selection of stories themselves. Interestingly, it can be anticlimactic to read the right story at the wrong time or wrong order and a mediocre story might have a striking effect on the reader if its placement is right. Collections often tend to start with flashy stories to get you hooked, but can fail to keep up that umph later into the book. Sometimes you have a build-up and sometimes a strong middle streak. In my experience, whether in the Best Horror of the Year Anthology or in other thematically sorted anthologies, this middle streak has offered me some of the best short stories I have read, and I read a lot of them. Luckily, Through the Night Like a Snake, is one of those anthologies which does not lose, but on the contrary mightily gains steam and I was lucky to have found some of the strongest stories in the middle;

Soroche by Mónica Ojeda shows the horrors of aging in the time of social media and amateur filming from the point of view of five women who take a trip into the mountains as a consolation for one of them who goes through separation and revenge porn.
This story describes images which will never ever leave my mind. It is horrifying, disgusting, yet so tragic, so sad and so comical all at the same time, so much so you want to take off your hat and bow before the author.

The Third Transformation by Maximiliano Barrientos – cosmic horror in a Latin American setting is something else entirely. Delicious. I would absolutely love to read this short story about two metalheads breaking into the house of an old European Nazi expat and finding themselves pulled into a circle of transformation and instrumentalization for violence in book length, this story absolutely needs to be longer. I have been searching other works by the author but unluckily couldn’t find any English translations.

Visitor by Julián Isaza. Though written in a lighter tone, this story describes an incident from such an unusual angle that you won’t know whether to laugh or to cry when you’re finished. One of the finest psychological horror writings, mixing paranormality with sorrow. Just wow.

The collection ends with a tour de force, The House of Compassion by Camilla Sosa Villada in which a sex worker ends up in a sort of psychedelic monastery. Having dragged you through so much powerful feelings, so much pain, terror, sadness and tragedy, the anthology closes by putting a smile on your face.

On a final note, I’d like to highlight the absolute beauty of the physical book – the cover art, the small format, the illustrations separating the stories – an absolutely gorgeous addition to any personal library.