El efecto transilvania, Juan Ramón Biedma

I'm now reading a book published by Rocaeditorial, one of our clients, entitled 'El efecto transilvania' and written by Juan Ramón Biedma (http://www.juanramonbiedma.es/).

It is a very promising book half way between fantasy and thriller. In fact, it is like a description of a long, complex and multilevelled nightmare. Some critics here are comparing it to the best works of Poe, Lovecraft, Boris Vian or Jean Ray.

The story takes place in the Spanish city of Seville, but Biedma converts it into a surrealistic city, a parallel world. In the novel we have a 14 years old boy who has just left hospital, but he does not know why was he sent there, or what was his illness. His family keeps it a secret, even to him. In fact, ha has been sent to Seville to live with his grandmother after his father suffered a weird accident.

The child, called Eme, feels that something unusual is happening in the city. A series of uncanny events sharpen this sensation while the city is thrilled because of the opening of an exact replica of the Peruvian pyramid of Mahuachi. Soon Eme realises that the pyramid is responsible for the strange events that take place: enormous drawings appear suddenly on the ground, there are plants that generate living animals instead of flowers, a little girl's phantom scares the priest of a church, big owls fly over the city and, everyday, hundreds of kites are raised form a precise neighbourhood...

In between, Eme is attracted to a girl called Peña, who has a golden piercing and the ability of moving objects with her mind. But there's a sinister man who follows her everywhere, and one day she is kidnapped.

Eme and his friends will look for her, but our protagonist is driven crazy because of the 'Transilvania effect' (a confusion of one's own mind that has to do with the phases of the moon). Eme starts hesitating and feels immersed in a nightmare that blurs his past and his future, his friends and his enemies...

Next year Rocaeditorial will publish a sequel of this novel that could be read separately in which we will find Eme and other characters of the novel as grown up adults... all in all it sounds really intriguing!