Daniel Arjona Madrid
Madrid
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He studied engineering, works as a teacher of video game design and development and, after nine novels and a book of short stories under his belt, he is one of the most recognized and read Spanish horror and speculative fiction writers. But
Emilio Bueso
(Castellón, 1974) has also always been a
rare bird
of the trade, a proud inhabitant of the margins of the Spanish publishing industry. He has always published on small labels, he has always been daring when trying new and risky ways of publishing. This is what he did with his previous trilogy,
Transcrepuscular
, which he published for a rigorous and limited Gigamesh commission in luxurious and very expensive volumes.
That is why it never ceased to surprise many that his new novel,
Still Life
, made the leap to Ediciones B, owned by Penguin Random House. In its pages, agricultural engineer Claudia Carbonell flees in her 40s from a bad divorce and various addictions to take refuge in a house on the shores of a Levantine swamp that soon traps her in a nightmare greater than the one she escaped from. .
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How does the spark of this novel light? I grew up on a farm. When she was eight or nine years old, she would take the bike and ride through that area, it was immense. She found me with a neighbor who made some scary sculptures, with a hunchbacked lady who scared me to death. I was looking for frogs and a huge newt appeared... Anyway, they were my first departures from the nest, I was flying alone for the first time and everything was strange and terrifying. Because the Valencian garden can be terrifying. Those childhood fears stayed inside me and I always had it in my head to write a story that took place in a marshland like the one in Castellón, those wetlands that I knew that today, by the way, have been ruined. Return to terror after 10 years. Then he ventured into one of the craziest adventures in Spanish literature, the
Transcrepuscular
science fiction trilogy that was sold, so to speak, as
crowdfunding
. How was the experience? Good and bad. What [editor] Alejo Cuervo did was great, it worked well with me but not with international authors. He ended up decapitalized because it was impossible for him to pay off the translations of many of the books he published.
Transcrepuscular
', among all its editions and limited editions, sold more than six thousand copies. We got a different model to work, we did a lot of goat riding and we had a great time. But what I wanted was for the omnibus with the three volumes and thousand pages to reach a broader audience. And just when it was already distributed, Alejo decided to fold his sails and send everything to the wind because he could no longer bear any more losses. It's the fourth time that a stamp has hit me. The fourth time? It happened to me with Verbigracia, with Salto de Página, with Valdemar Insomnia. And it happened to me again with Gigamesh. I was exhausted and fed up. And I thought that to continue gaining more and more readers in a shrinking market, I had to jump from a small label to a big one. He has a reputation as an anti-system author. After having known the smallest and the largest of our publishing industry, what is your diagnosis of genre publishing in Spain? Small genus seals are seasonal fruit. They are along the way. I've been doing this for 18 years and there are almost none of those left when I started. Only Valdemar. At a time when I was completely burned out as a writer and in a bad personal moment, Clara Rasero, the editor of Ediciones B, called me and told me that she was going to publish whatever I wanted to write and with good conditions, not like other regrettable offers. that came to me like, for example, from Minotaur. I was about to quit! I am very happy with the work Ediciones B. And with that
blurb
that they have given me: "Terror lurks on every page." Let's go with the terror. I interviewed Catriona Ward and she assured me that adults find fear embarrassing and they never want to admit it. Does a horror novel challenge our fears or our shame? We are our fears. To define anything is to limit it and nothing limits you as much as your own fears. But fear is also much deeper and more abstract than we usually think. Let us not forget that fear sustains all religions and political systems. Fear, finally, challenges our self-preservation instinct, it is what keeps us alive. No species can survive without fear. And that is why I am going to continue writing about fear. Claudia Carbonell, an agricultural engineer with a traumatic divorce and fibromyalgia behind her, secludes herself, to be reborn or die in the attempt, in an isolated house on the edge of a Valencian swamp. Little by little the reader begins to suspect that she is a not very reliable narrator. She is a character tailored to my nerves but she is brave, not like me. If she were not brave, on the second night of strange events she would have fled. She is a tough character, very rational, capable of resisting superstitions. And she goes crazy and sane at the same time. Lovecraft presented madness as something dichotomous, either you are crazy or you are not. That's obsolete. Today more than half of the population consumes psychotropic drugs. We are crazy? Not at all. Are we sane? Neither. In his novel
Cenital
(2012), the countryside was a place of resistance after the collapse. But in
Still Life
it has become an ominous and terrifying place. Does Claudia's isolation in some way imply a surrender? They are different things. An ecovillage like
Cenital
It is a community where people share bakery and take care of each other. The Valencian garden is a territory of independent plots. There are many neighbors who never leave their farm except to make a paella every three weeks. Each one is the owner and lord of his territory, each one guards his property with his shotgun. That is the difference. But I also recognize one thing: over time I have become disillusioned with the bucolic and pastoral country life. Why? Largely due to climate change. A terrible hailstorm in July, as happened a couple of years ago, ruins everything for you. Your trees can flower three times a year, thus destroying your harvest. Anyway, my grandfather supported the whole family with his farm and today, with much more advanced technology, there does not seem to be any future for a small independent farmer. What do you think of the current revolt in the countryside? We will have to return to the countryside. Yes or yes, you can no longer live in cities and I fear that AI is going to end many more jobs than we think. But it can't be "every man for himself." Climate change is not going to make it easy for us. We have to rethink the field.
Cenital
is one of the icons of collapse. Lately the debate has intensified, with former collapseists now supporters of degrowth who assure that collapseism is a defeatism that does not offer any opportunity for political action. How has the discussion continued? All those ex-collapseists have understood that the collapse is going to be slower than we thought. Like it happened to me when I wrote
Cenital
in 2007. Then I thought everything would go to shit in seven years and here we are. What happened? Fracking , the reduction of energy consumption, the pandemic and the war in Ukraine with
its
restrictions have given us more time. The system is more elastic and resilient than the neo-Malthusians had calculated. Maybe instead of sinking in three years or three decades, we sank in 300 years, like the Roman Empire. I myself have become more serene, today I am more concerned about the derivatives bubble than about peak oil. But I still think that one day we will jump into the air.