Creepy tale has some eerie grandeur and laughs
Barcelona in 1911: a city reeling from bloody street fighting between police and citizens, filled with wounded veterans of Spanish military campaigns in Morocco. The lowly inhabitants of El Raval’s red light district are on edge because a monster who abducts children is at large. As it turns out, the rumours are true.
None of this is made up. Barcelona Shadows is based on the blood-curdling true story of the infamous Enriqueta Marti, also known as “the vampire of Barcelona.” A former prostitute who procured children for wealthy pedophiles, she owed her infamy to an even more appalling trade she specialized in. She kidnapped and murdered a number of children, and used their body parts to make creams and potions that she sold to her rich clientele.
Since not much is known of Marti’s real background or indeed the number of her victims, Spanish author Marc Pastor is free to weave a garish tale around the facts. Moises Corvo is his addition to the story, a “copper” who bears a physical resemblance to King Alfonso XIII and a moral resemblance to Clint Eastwood in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
Amusingly, Inspector Corvo has read his Sherlock Holmes and Auguste Dupin, and is dismissive of both, at one point using the pseudonym Lestrade. An irreverent, likable, all too human habitue of the city’s brothels, he wants to find out why the children of prostitutes are disappearing. Pastor interlaces fiction and non-fiction neatly in a police procedural with a rich period setting that was a Spanish bestseller in 2008.
In his non-writing life, Pastor has the best credentials — he works as a CSI in Barcelona. So when he leads us into an autopsy room we feel we can trust the details, from the black humour to the flesh-eating flies. His knowledge of his city pumps through the veins of his novel, and there’s a more than flesh-deep preoccupation with mutilated bodies.
Death provides a conversational commentary that is chilling and grimly funny, including asides as warning any readers with sensitive stomachs to skip to the next chapter or else “stay, and a corner of your mind will be revealed to you.”