Simon Lopez Trujillo's 'mind-blowing' (Gabriela Cabezon Camara) debut takes readers into a dry and degraded, fire-prone landscape where humanity has encroached a step too far into the natural world, and a deadly fungus mounts its own resistance.In the disorienting, devastatingly tense world of Lopez Trujillo, a eucalyptus farm worker named Pedro starts coughing. Several of his coworkers die of a strange fungal disease, which has jumped to humans for the first time, but Pedro, miraculously, awakes. His survival fascinates a foreign mycologist, as well as a local priest, who dubs his mysterious mutterings to be the words of a prophet. Meanwhile Pedro s kids are left to fend for themselves: the young Cata, whose creepy art projects are getting harder and harder to decipher, and Patricio, who wasn t ready to be thrust into the role of father. Their competing efforts to reckon with Pedro s condition eventually meet in a horrifying climax that readers will never forget.For readers of Jeff Vandermeer and Samanta Schweblin, Lopez Trujillo is a next-generation Bolano with a fresh, speculative edge and a mind that's always one step ahead of us.
