I picked up The Twilight Zone and Fernández's novel Space Invaders at the same time from one of my local indie bookstores. Books like these are the reason I will forever shop indie. I never would have heard of Nona Fernández had it not been for NetGalley. Fernández's writing (and Natasha Wimmer's translation) is hypnotic, raw, and full of a kind of energy that I don't see very often. The Twilight Zone is a book I will read again with a pen in hand because it is so dense and so packed with context that I just know I missed about 8000 things while reading it the first time.

Andres Antonio Valenzuela Morales, Soldier First Class, ID #39432
The Man Who Tortured People

This is a shattering account of the "disappeared" in Chile under Pinochet. It imagines the soldier who want to a reporter's office and testified of what he knew and what he did. It tries to place what he did in the context of that country and that time. It doesn't exonerate what he did, but does acknowledge that he gave this testimony at great danger to himself. It gives dimension to this insane historical erasure. Absolutely important and extremely well-written.

This novel is an engrossing look at recent Chilean politics and the way our minds try to ignore violence by pretending it belongs to another world entirely. Twilight Zone focuses on the search for a man who worked as a torturer for the Chilean military before deciding to inform journalists about his past and the complicity of the government in fascistic crackdowns against its political opposition. The narrator tells his story by tracing the lives of families he intersected with, while constantly relating this to the present-day amnesia of modern Chile, where everyone is trying to gloss over this violence in order to "move forward." While a bit more repetitive than it needs to be, the book reaffirms the value of imagination and research in keeping the horrors of the past from recurring again.

I’m judging a 2021 fiction contest. It’d be generous to call what I’m doing upon my first cursory glance—reading. I also don’t take this task lightly. As a fellow writer and lover of words and books, I took this position—in hopes of being a good literary citizen. My heart aches for all the writers who have a debut at this time. What I can share now is the thing that held my attention and got this book from the perspective pile into the read further pile.

“When I was a girl, I was told that if I misbehaved the man with the sack would come for me. All disobedient children disappeared into that wicked old man’s bottomless dark sack, But rather than frighten me, the story piqued my curiosity.”-Yas! Same girl same.