Stephen King would be hard-pressed to come up with a story more terrifying than this one because it’s based in reality.
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Stephen King would be hard-pressed to come up with a story more terrifying than this one because it’s based in reality.
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SPOILERS FOLLOW
Our story begins with a young woman, an editor who works online. Her mother has just died. She has used up most of her money buying her mother’s medication on the black market – the only way she could get it. She had no idea if they were real drugs on not, but what else can she do? Almost no one comes to the funeral – cemeteries are unsafe places. She worries that her mother’s body will be dug up immediately so people can steal her clothes and jewelry.
Now she’s alone. Her father was always absent and she has only has some elderly aunts in a distant rural town.
She lives in an apartment in the heart of Caracas so she has a bird’s eye view of the daily chaos. Crime is such that no one can go out after 6 pm. Kids can’t leave their houses to go to playgrounds. She hears gunshots every day and bursts of fire from automatic weapons. Anti-government demonstrations are so frequent that she has taped the edges of her windows to prevent tear gas from getting in.
She has her own bone to pick with the government. She had a lover, an older man, a journalist, who was murdered for his anti-government reporting.
Of all this terror, most frightening to me is her description of the role that the paramilitary types play. The government encourages these semi-official pro-government armed motorcycle gangs to come out and kick ass during anti-government demonstrations. They are free to kill and torture people. The government pays them with crates of food that they can sell on the black market. They set up roadblocks and charge 'tolls.' The military cannot control them.
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A gang of paramilitary biker women – wives and girlfriends, who knows – take over the apartment that she owns. They simply arrive one day, break the lock, trash or steal all her stuff and move in while she is out. When our main character is foolish enough to protest, they knock her unconscious with a pistol.
Should she call the police? Let me tell you about the police. They raided another apartment in her building a week ago ‘looking for someone.’ They didn’t find the person but they left with a laptop, a microwave, a TV and suitcases full of stuff.
Another character enters the scene. He is a college-aged student, the brother of a friend of hers. The girlfriend has been told her brother is in prison and has been paying the prison officials to give him food – another shakedown. The girlfriend really has no idea if the brother is dead or alive or even in the prison – she just pays.
This young man comes to live with her for a time in her new location. (I won’t give away what she did to find housing except to say it involved the disposal of another body.) The young man was in prison where he was tortured until he agreed to join one of the paramilitary groups. Now he’s on the run from everyone. Should she believe him?
So, Stephen King, how do we end this horror story? Relatively happily if you don’t mind nightmares for the rest of your life.
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The book review is over but I’ve added some facts about recent events in Venezuela from the web. We don’t hear much about the crisis in Venezuela because other world tragedies, like Ukraine, have pushed Venezuela off the front page or out of the media entirely.
Venezuela’s economy, society and government have largely disintegrated. This began under Chavez in 1999 and has continued under the current President/dictator Maduro.
People are starving: By 2017, a UN report said hunger had escalated to the point where almost 75% of the population had lost an average of over 19 pounds in weight.
A UN report estimated in March 2019 that 94% of Venezuelans lived in poverty.
By 2021 almost twenty percent of Venezuelans (5.4 million) had left their country. This is more people than have fled Ukraine and a higher percentage of the national population.
Venezuela led the world in murder rate, with 81 per 100,000 people killed in 2018. This is about 20 times the murder rate in the USA.
The inflation rate in Venezuela averaged 3,730% from 1973 until 2022, making paper money worthless at times. People barter and US dollars and euros are the currency, or online transactions based in those currencies.
The government has given up trying to control large rural areas of the country. Drug lords are the government there.
The author was born in Caracas (1982) and worked as a journalist until she emigrated to Spain about ten years ago. She has written a half-dozen novels, although Night and a collection of short stories appear to be the only books translated into English.
Top photo of violence in Caracas from timesofisrael.com Photo from cnn.com The author from caracaschronicles.com...more
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