By Bill Littlefield

For those with an appetite for lyrical absurdity, this dark and demanding journey into a bedeviled night will repay the effort.

A Carnival of Atrocities by Natalia García Freire. Translated from the Spanish by Victor Meadowcroft. World Editions, 144 pages, $19.99.

In this novel by Ecuadorian Natalia García Freire, magic realism means that one day a number of people walk out of a town that’s on no map for no reason anyone left behind can discern, unless it simply makes it easier to get away from the town, Cocuan, which some think of as “the carnival of atrocities.”  The travelers walk through a bleak and dangerous landscape, headed nowhere in particular, unless it’s to a “crag,” which is mentioned several times. Eventually, the people who remain in Cocuan collectively decide that they must catch up to the deserters. If necessary, they will “grab them by the hair and drag them back to Cocuan,” perhaps to save them, though returning to Cocuan does not come across as a desirable goal, though the place is referred to once as “a town of God.”

The story of the escapees from Cocuan and the attempt to bring them back is told by eight of the members of the party who set out to capture the wanderers. Each of the accounts contains gruesome details. A couple mention an encounter with an apparently mad priest who chops off his own ears. One of the travelers has thoughtfully packed provisions but, when the napkin covering the basket of food is removed, everything is covered with worms. One of the voyagers is so desperate to recover the money he has loaned to another man on the trek he knocks the debtor unconscious and proceeds to pull out his gold teeth. Another quester insists that the mission he’s on was inspired by God, and claims, “there’s nothing better than feeling yourself chosen by God and heeding his call.” It doesn’t seem to be a “feeling” shared by most of the other travelers.

“We’re an old and vanquished town,” remarks Augustina, early on during the journey. “We’re all composed of dust and evil, like nightmares”. Much of the novel comes across as a nightmare. Animals behave in weird and troubling ways, especially birds. Fear is a constant presence. That said, Baltasar, another of the travelers, explains at one point, “I’ll say one thing for fear; it brings you closer to God”. But there doesn’t seem to be much hope for salvation or redemption in García Freire’s hellish absurdist vision.

What the author DOES give us is poetry. She takes us for a ride on a horse that “burst into a gallop and you felt the cold wind that moved through your pores and told you things you couldn’t understand but knew to be true, and you didn’t stop, not you or the horse, crossing that labyrinth of stone as though racing toward the devil, laughing all the way.” A page later that “cold wind” becomes “a wind that rocked you, waves with no sea.” There are echoes of Samuel Beckett in portions of this mordant fable, but Garcia Freire’s dreamy poetry is her own.

A Carnival of Atrocities is not for every reader. But for those with the patience to read multiple accounts of the same failed errand and prepared to appreciate (perhaps to identify with, at least a little) the sometimes terrifying, often bleak and desperate visions experienced by travelers in the dark, this journey into a bedeviled night will repay the effort.

Bill Littlefield’s most recent novel is Mercy, published in 2022 by Black Rose Writing.