The minute you dive into Alphaland, you’re transported to a surreal world swirling with mystery, terror, and the inexplicable. Dead fathers come back to haunt their tortured daughters; prostitutes turn out to be horrifying, human-devouring alien intelligences; spaceships function as nurturing mothers. Basically, when Cristina Jurado is telling you a story, you should really listen.
Alphaland may not be a large collection (six stories, together adding up to just over 120 pages), but it is intense, like a long, sustained nightmare that lasts the whole time you’re asleep. Each story takes up a different aspect of the surreal or fantastic: here we find vampires, aliens, ghosts, and organic intelligences. What binds them together is Jurado’s singular style, which involves seemingly-effortless build-ups, sentence by sentence, of the clash between the “real” and the fantastic. At times, such as in “The Second Death of the Father” (which, unsurprisingly, won the 2017 Ignotus Prize), Jurado delves deep into a character’s psyche, patiently adding up a character’s feelings and memories until the sum of these parts produces an almost tangible picture of horror.
You want to know my favorites from this collection, right? Of course you do! This is hard, but I’d have to choose “Inchworm” and “Second Death of the Father.” It’s these two stories that, for me, were the richest in strange imagery and psychological exploration. As Jurado explains in an author’s note to “Inchworm,” this story began with a single image: David Bowie “hanging from a wall, in a kind of life support system, with a number of tubes emerging from his suit” in his music video “Ashes to Ashes.” From two flashes of this picture years ago, Jurado built this story of an astronaut on a mission to recover the bodies of two other astronauts, all three of whom are killed by faulty equipment. The astronaut “speaking” in this story had launched himself out of the airlock rather than die in his ship, and next thing he knew, he was in the belly of some unknown vessel (whom he nearly calls “mother”), traveling who-knows-where. We never find out what exactly this vessel is that has put its tubes into him and is repairing his body and treating him with such TLC. Similarly, we don’t see any aliens or find out where the ship is going. This is a story of “inner space” set in outer space, and it switches back and forth between the narrator’s awareness of his present condition and his past with his brother. And in the midst of this unsettling, vaguely-terrifying situation, the narrator sadly remembers that he probably won’t see Marianne (his wife?) again: “Marianne, smoking at the window, dressed in an old shirt, the rain licking the panes behind her.” It’s brief, lovely images like that, appearing throughout these stories, that make the whole collection a true work of art.
Like “Inchworm,” “Second Death of the Father” is filled with more memories than events. Jurado plumbs the depths of the unnamed protagonist’s emotional turmoil—her pain at having to say goodbye to a father she barely knew, her terror when what seems like his ghost returns to haunt her, albeit passively. Jurado brilliantly describes the haunted woman’s growing unease and terror with language that causes these same feelings in the reader. We, too, experience the anxiety and the flashes of everyday life amidst the unending sea of painful sightings of the “ghost.” The protagonist’s ultimate disintegration/transformation into her dead father’s image mirrors the physical transformation of the politician in “Vanth” as he becomes distended and no longer recognizable as a human once the alien prostitute “devours” him.
These two stories may be my favorites in the collection, but “Vanth,” “Alice,” “The Shepherd,” and “Alphaland” too invite us to drop preconceived notions about “reality” and give ourselves up to whatever terrifying thing Jurado wants to tell us about. Like “Second Death of the Father,” the title story explores hauntings and the porous boundary between “reality” and fantasy. Here, the narrator recounts thirty years of living with dream images that have regularly broken through into his waking life—not exactly “ghosts,” but acting like the ghosts we’ve all heard about, following the narrator around, disrupting his life and efforts to interact with others. A car accident abruptly ends the narrator’s constant battle to keep dreams and reality separate…but this is most likely because he’s in a permanent coma, and now the dreams have taken over, though the narrator seems to view the images as “real” life finally triumphing.
In “The Shepherd,” highly-evolved vampires, too, are haunted, but this time by shadows that they do their utmost to avoid. The protagonist of “Alice” has her memory completely wiped, and yet her murderous nature breaks through into her consciousness, a “haunting” of a different kind, suggesting that the subconscious has a stubborn kind of strength that resists even the powers of advanced technology.
Jurado’s authorial voice is at once terrifying and soothing—like the astronaut’s experience in the alien vessel. And while translation itself is never an easy, straightforward task, turning Jurado’s Spanish stories into English stories had to have been an intensely immersive experience. Translator James Womack has brought us much Spanish SF in translation before (including stories in The Best of Spanish Steampunk and The Big Book of Science Fiction), so we already know before even opening this collection that the stories will read seamlessly. Womack’s channeling of Jurado’s sense of dread in each story is absolutely essential for an Anglophone reader’s enjoyment of this collection. So thank you, James Womack, for enabling those of us who can’t read Spanish to experience these masterful stories.
This is Jurado’s first collection, and I can’t wait to read her future collections (and perhaps novels, too?). Lavie Tidhar’s right: Jurado is a powerful voice in Spanish SF.
So now, please shut down your computer and go read Alphaland.
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