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In the depths of April, in the loneliest weeks of quarantine, the American publishers of Stephen King brought forward the publication of If it bleeds , scheduled until then for the end of May. Everything seemed to make sense then: What if the incomprehensible and sinister things that were happening in the world in those days were the incomprehensible and sinister consequence of the acts of some King character? This is how their stories usually work: someone does something, perhaps an apparently irrelevant act of evil, which has absurd and terrible consequences. In principle, the cause-effect relationship seems impossible, but, with the turning of the pages, a pattern is revealed.Let's say that a girl, at some institute in Maine or somewhere like that, has broken the heart of a classmate and that's why hundreds of thousands of people die of coronavirus and the world stops in an agonizing parenthesis.

If it bleeds is already If the blood rules (Spanish edition in Plaza & Janés), a collection of four long stories (447 pages in total) that arrives at the right time. The world, for years, has become very Stephen King and anyone can see it if he turns on the television for a while: Stranger things has the terrifying and adolescent texture of many of the writer's classic stories; Years and years and Black mirror speak of self-destructive and ungovernable worlds like those in their novels. And the clown Pennywise It was in theaters a couple of years ago as a metaphor for contemporary politics.

If blood rules, it contains many of those recognizable traits in King. In order of appearance: Mr. Harrigan's phone , the first nouvelle in the collection, is the story of a village boy who falls for the local millionaire. Craig, the kid in the story, reads psalms at church and does it so well that he catches the eye of his old neighbor, Mr. Harrigan. Harrigan hires him to read novels because his eyesight is tired: The Heart of Darkness, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Silas Marner ... Those kinds of novels are the ones they share.

Between reading and reading, Craig encourages the millionaire to use one of the first iPhones to hit the market. The phone, as you can guess from the book's title, is the fetish that takes the story to another place, to a slightly rugged ghost story. But in reality, that matters less than the realistic portrait of the life of a teenager: the discovery of books, complexes, love, orphanhood, aggressiveness of the institute ... The Craig Stephen King could be a character from The world according to Garp by John Irving, a good boy and dazzled before the world brought to the times of smart phones.

Juan Bonilla has maintained in these pages that the best of Stephen King is not fantasy but that realism, full of naturalness and compassion. The life of Chuck , the second story of The Blood Rules , confirms his theory. Its first 15 pages are fireworks : the world is ending. California has collapsed, the Midwest is consumed in a gigantic fire, workers no longer come to their jobs, the government cannot guarantee its services, and the internet no longer works. King's characters react to fatality with resignation and a certain integrity. They say "bad vibes" when they discover that San Francisco no longer exists and also when they see that they cannot connect to Netflix. Only one thing worries them: the appearance everywhere of advertisements that celebrate the life of a certain Chuck, someone they had never heard of.

From there, the story takes a turn and becomes a search: who was that Chuck? No one in particular, another good boy who danced well and sang badly , who was orphaned in adolescence but grew up with reasonable love around him, who one day was amazed to discover the verse "I contain crowds" by Walt Whitman, who had a good but not very good job and that a year before his death he had an unexpected moment of fulfillment thanks to a street musician. Does the world end because Chuck dies at 39? If the first story in The Blood Commands is reminiscent of John Irving, the second story uncovers a thread that connects Stephen King's novels with those of Jonathan Franzen.

If the blood rules, it is the third story in the collection, the one that gives it its title, the longest and probably the most elaborate. Interestingly, it is also the most conventional according to the laws of the thriller . Its protagonist is Holly Gibney, a secondary character in Mr. Mercedes , King's first detective novel, who here rises in rank and announces a probable new saga. Not bad Gibney as a contemporary detective. Her life is not heroic: her elderly mother bullies her a bit, her clients fill her with depressing commissions, and her car is a blue Toyota Prius. Realism becomes hyperrealism. Gibney takes pepsi tails , watches baseball games on TV, drives on bland roads ... and, meanwhile, reflects on the abstract nature of evil. Obviously, King offers you an opportunity to test those ideas through a child murder virtuoso who will get in your way.

The rat , the last text in the collection, is the shortest and also the wildest. In short, a writer who was promising but remained stagnant, discovers that every time he advances in his literary projects, something terrible happens in the world. Why? A rat will appear in his garret, start talking and offer him a mephis-philical pact . In The Rat , Stephen King looks like Stephen King: the world of nightmares invades reality, the protagonist is a writer who perhaps recognizes himself, as in many of his classic novels, and fantasy has an air absurd humor. But it is that almost everything looks like Stephen King at the moment.

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