Overview

There are books that comfort us with the illusion that the world can be neatly understood. Arbeit Macht Frei and Other Stories does the opposite. Eduardo Valdivia Sanz opens doors to places where history, memory, and fear refuse to sit still: missile silos and death camps, Peruvian dystopias and Texas backroads, hotel rooms, trenches, and gas chambers where time itself seems to loop and stutter. From the opening piece, ""The Silo,"" we are thrown into the moral vertigo of a soldier who chooses disobedience over genocide, only to be declared a ""hero"" and locked away. That word, like many in this collection, fractures as we turn it in our hands. The same happens with the iron arch of Auschwitz in ""Arbeit Macht Frei,"" where the famous lie over the gate becomes not only a historical curse but a lens for all the other deceits that run through the book: those of nations, churches, families, and of the self. Valdivia Sanz moves with unsettling ease between genres. War story, cosmic horror, science fiction, ghost tale, political fable, domestic drama: each form is tested to see how much truth it can bear. In ""Dystopia 03 of Peruvian Reality: The Temple,"" religious tyranny and virtual reality intertwine until the reader no longer knows whether liberation is happening in the world or only inside the mind of a condemned believer. ""The Time Traveler"" suggests that even with unlimited energy and a machine to rewrite history, human violence finds a way to reassert itself. Attempts to ""fix"" the past become one more engine of terror. What unifies this variety is not a shared setting but a shared wound. Again and again, we encounter characters trapped in loops: a Nazi soul reborn inside a Jewish infant; a dictator condemned to relive his final day; a boy buried alive inside his own funeral; a country that wakes too late from its own manufactured faith. Time in these stories is not a straight line but a trench, a corridor, a bunker, a gas chamber: you cross it only to find you are back at the same door. There is also, crucially, the Latin American thread. The Peru of these pages is not postcard folklore but a fractured territory where cults, corporations, and paramilitary forces shape everyday life. Yet the same mechanisms of control appear in New Orleans clinics, Texan towns, Viennese academies, and Transylvanian villages. The book insists that horror is not a foreign product; it is local, domestic, intimate. It speaks our language, wears our uniforms, shares our bed. And still, beneath the darkness, there is a stubborn human residue: a marchioness who chooses her son over her class, a ""fool"" in Abilene who knows exactly how much his dignity is worth, a refugee's son who discovers that madness and guilt can be inherited along with a surname. Valdivia Sanz does not offer redemption, but he does offer clarity: a hard, clean look at the ways we repeat our cruelties, and at the fragile, irrational gestures that sometimes interrupt them. To read this collection is to walk a border: between realism and nightmare, between the historical record and the things history prefers not to write down. It asks for courage, and it rewards that courage with something rare in contemporary fiction: the feeling that behind each page there is a mind willing to look where most of us look away. Welcome to the territory of Eduardo Valdivia Sanz. Keep the light on. Turn the page.

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