• Javier Castillo, the boy on the train
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Mandala books, children's hobby books, self-help books, smoking cessation books ... These days the category of "best-selling books" of home and online sales platforms portrays a world on the brink of attack by nerves. In the midst of the mess, a novel stands out as the most widely read book of the COVID-19 crisis in Spain. It is called The Snow Girl (Sum of Letters) and it has the signature of Javier Castillo (Málaga, 1987), a writer who until now has been a bit below the radar of the media.

"In my neighborhood there was a stationery store with a revolving display rack full of pocket books. My mother gave me 1,000 pesetas in pay and I bought all the Agatha Christie novels for 995 pesetas a copy. Then I started writing by imitation. According to a 10 page story called Cuatro negritos , you can imagine what that was. I never stopped writing, although it was always a thing I did alone and did not share. I never went to creative literature courses, for example. I did Economics, I was employed in one of those 12-hour jobs in the office ... I wrote on the train back home, always stories. One day I had a dream, the image I started with came The day I lost sanity and woke up with the idea of ​​writing something else, a novel, "explains Castillo.

The day his sanity was lost he went out into the world in 2014 via desktop publishing. He hit the key, connected with thousands of readers and had a follow-up, The day love was lost . In August 2017, Castillo quit his job and devoted himself to literature. "He had 100,000 books sold in five months. He was starting to have translation offers with significant money and had another novel already planned. In one week, 40,000 people signed up to a mailing list to receive advances on the novel ..." The book came in 2019 with the title of Everything that Happened to Miranda Huff . A year later, in the week in which Spain was locked up at home, The Snow Girl debuted.

" Miranda Huff presented her in an 800-person theater and we filled up," Castillo explains. "This year we reserved a theater of 1,200 people to present The Snow Girl and I was a little scared ... But we had to cancel and do a network presentation. 6,000 people saw it live and 60,000 delayed. I am also amazed "

What is The Snow Girl ? In short, 100,000 words of a psychological tension thriller, with sophisticated settings, tormented investigators and lost children. A little Joel Dicker, a little, a little John Verdon, a little Dana Scully. A girl disappears in New York in 1998; years later, her parents receive a VHS in which the girl is seen healthy and happy . A journalist named Miren rescues her case, follows the trail and, along the way, investigates the dark areas of her own story.

Thriller writers there are many. What is special about Castillo? "I am a very analytical person. It will be the inheritance of having dedicated myself to the economy. I prepare the novels with an excel , I organize the information very well and I arrange it as a game. Everything is tightening a rope and releasing it, taking another rope and releasing it. I keep it very closed when I start writing. " And so? "They tell me that I write in a very attentive way to emotions. Not only do things happen in my books, not only do cars explode, people disappear, they appear as corpses, etc. There is also an attention to what it feels like"

"My family and people who know me very closely say that they do not recognize me in what they read to me, but I know that in these books there is something very intimate. I speak very quickly, as a child I was run over . However, in the Inside my head the voice with which I think is serene, it goes slowly. It is the same voice with which I write and I suppose that's why I wrote, because it helped me relax. That is why it was easy for me to make this novel, very natural. The challenge, now, is to separate myself from that facility. The character of Miren [the investigative journalist for The Snow Girl ] is supposed to continue to grow in the next novels and that will be at the cost of having her voice , not mine "

"I know the person who reads me quite well, I find patterns among the people who come to the presentations," explains Castillo. "Many women, from 18 to 45 years old ... I keep them in mind and try to touch them and connect with them. I am not that strange , they worry me and I like the same things that they do. But I know that I cannot do everything thinking of pleasing the reader. That I have to go there. The snow girl is made to move, not as a complaint, but also serves to talk about sensationalism and psychological violence. "

And if Javier Castillo thinks of himself in 10 years, with six or seven more novels in his career, in what sense would you like his stories to have grown? "My early novels were built on the plot rather than the characters. The latter are based more on complex characters. Now, the challenge is that those characters are not only complex but have a voice of their own and different."

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