The Horror of the Inexplicable
Reviews
By Gabino Iglesias
In my early teens, I realized fear was not something literature regularly made me feel. That said, I turned to certain dark narratives because the power of literature was never more present or more palpable to me than when a story made me feel profoundly unsettled. The stories in Elvira Navarro’s Rabbit Island aren’t easy to push into the horror box, but they are all deeply unsettling, and the uncertainties they evoke shine brighter against the backdrop of Navarro’s luminous prose.
Simply put, the eleven short stories that make up Rabbit Island are weird. They inhabit the interstitial spaces of everyday reality, dreams, and the impossible. Rabbit Island sets the mood early and gets progressively more bizarre while maintaining an uncanny atmosphere. “Gerardo’s Letters” is a tale about a woman staying at a decrepit hotel in a small town while trying to finally end a crumbling relationship. We all have been in this kind of relationship, but the aura of the hotel gets under our skin and the need to escape that exudes from Navarro’s writing somehow transfers to us. And that’s just the beginning.
After establishing that things here are not always what the reader expects them to be, Navarro takes a leap forward. In “Strychnine,” the main character has a paw growing out of her chest. Short and creepy, this story opens things up and lets readers know Navarro wants to do more than unsettle. She’s out to inject them with the horror of the inexplicable, and she does so with simple, precise prose:
The mannequins are more real than the vendor. She doesn’t hide the paw from him; his face pales as he watches it timidly reaching out its three toes toward him. He runs screaming out of the store. She races after him; her intention is not to frighten him, but to pay for the hijabs, although halfway into her flight she forgets the reason for the pursuit. All of a sudden the man seems like her prey. He’s thin, like a greyhound. But she can run faster.
The presence of a hotel becomes a bridge that ties the first and second narratives together. Animals and hunting for prey then become a bridge that leads to the third story, “Rabbit Island.” While there are no throwaways in this collection, there are standouts, and this story is one of them. The plot is deceptively simple: a man uses a canoe to explore a tiny island in the middle of Spain’s Guadalquivir River. He becomes obsessed with the island and eventually introduces rabbits into its ecosystem. What starts as an experiment soon morphs into strange, cannibalistic mayhem that turns the little piece of land into a bloody chunk of chaos right under the noses of the town’s residents.
In Navarro’s work, simplicity often becomes something much darker, and “Paris Périphérie” is a brief master class in how to achieve that. If the plot of “Rabbit Island” is deceptively simple, the plot of “Paris Périphérie” is almost nonexistent: someone can’t find a building. That’s it . . . and yet the story works. Experiencing a sense of desperation and inescapable dread while doing something normal—like walking the streets of a city—feels simultaneously outré and relatable, incredible but perfectly plausible.
“Notes on the Architecture of Hell” is another standout. The story of a younger brother dealing with the collapse of his older brother’s sanity, this is truly a tale in which the door to the impossible opens up and swallows the reader. Furthermore, it’s a narrative in which Navarro makes a powerful aesthetic statement. There are no answers here, so don’t ask any questions; just enjoy the strange ride.
The last tale I want to highlight is “The Top Floor Room.” It offers the perfect example of how Navarro writes believable characters with one foot in noir and the other in the fantastic. The main character here is a hardworking cook at a crappy hotel who starts to occupy the dreams of those who work with her and some of the people who stay at the hotel. Navarro dexterously moves from the microcosm of her protagonist’s dreams and memories to the macrocosm of the cold city and the weird places in which the woman eventually ends up sleeping. This journey between inner and outer worlds is present in almost every story in Rabbit Island. Navarro’s mastery of the trope speaks volumes about her storytelling chops and her understanding of how the human psyche operates, especially when faced with the impossible.
Some authors bend reality at will, and Navarro belongs to this group. Her stories are brave in the sense that they push against the formula present in most literary fiction by shattering reality time and again while also delivering mysterious tales that contain few answers and character development that wouldn’t feel out of place in genre fiction. Rabbit Island, which has been masterfully translated by Christina MacSweeney, is an outstanding introduction to Navarro’s boundary-breaking work. This is a brilliant collection in which gritty surrealism, poetry, noir, and horror collide, and the result will stick with readers like the image of a grandmother floating in the air in the corner of a dark room.
Gabino Iglesias is a writer, professor, and book reviewer living in Austin, Texas. He is the author of Zero Saints and Coyote Songs and the editor of Both Sides: Stories from the Border. You can find him on Twitter @Gabino_Iglesias.
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