Winter Letters

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown," writes H. P. Lovecraft at the start of his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature". In real life, the author Agustín Fernández Paz, Galicia's answer to H. P. Lovecraft, is reading the newspaper and comes across a classified ad for a haunted house. He imagines what would happen if someone answered that ad. Then what would happen if they went to see the house and liked it. Then what would happen if they had enough money and decided to buy it. And finally what would happen if they went to live there and discovered that the house was really haunted. This is the plot of "Winter Letters", one of the best-selling Galician novels of all time. The house will bring to mind, for older readers, the Bates' home in Alfred Hitchcock's film "Psycho". Inside the house is a book of prints that may remind younger readers of Tom Riddle's diary in "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets". However this may be, the reader is sure to be drawn in by the force and power of the narrative, which is as smooth and sinuous as the sirens' song heard by Ulysses from the sanctuary of the mast of his ship. Agustín Fernández Paz is the author of another novel in English, "Black Air", about a psychiatrist's race against time to save his patient from a malignant presence, the Great Beast. He was awarded the Spanish National Prize for Literature in 2008 and is Spain's nominee for the Hans Christian Andersen Award. Other titles in the series Galician Wave include: "Dragal I: The Dragon's Inheritance" and "Dragal II: The Dragon's Metamorphosis" by Elena Gallego Abad, "Dove and Cut Throat" by Fina Casalderrey, "The Painter with the Hat of Mallows" by Marcos Calveiro and "I Love You Leo A. Destination Somewhere" by Rosa Aneiros.