The late left-wing, Chilean author Roberto Bolaño's novella By Night in Chile has a longer rejoinder to the memes about what a fascist is. Father Urrutia is on his deathbed and for the most part recounts a life of thwarted literary ambitions, religious devotion, and rubbing shoulders with the powerful. It is hard to get around the conclusion that he has participated in something both banal and monstrous.
When the powerful forces controlling the publishing industry maintain they’re looking for novels and memoirs between 60,000 and 80,000 words, it’s a natural outcome that a huge percentage of books are 250–300 pages long. In a better world, they would probably be shorter. *Down Below* by the late surrealist artist Leonora Carrington bucks that trend with a spare and efficient central text less than 70 pages long.
To get our comrades into spooky season, members of the New Kentucky editorial collective here present brief reviews of three haunting texts.
It should have been clear something bad was gonna happen: something surging out of the ancient repository where the facts from the Bible were kept.
