Cuentos para la medianoche.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

Cuentos para la medianoche is a collection of forty shorts in which Cuban writer Luis Angel Casas attempts to transport his readers to the realm of the fantastic and fill them with dread. These miniature horror stories, which reflect the influence of Edgar Allan Poe and other masters of the genre, appeal to our primal fears--of the familiar turned bizarre, of sudden catastrophe, of the inanimate come to life, of monsters and madness. A few of these stories hit the mark.

In a clever coupling of the absurd and the grotesque, "El monstruo en el coche" parodies the traditional love-at-first-sight romance. The story's narrator is a lonely bachelor who becomes infatuated with a beautiful woman he frequently sees wheeling a baby carriage. When he finally gathers enough courage to speak to her, he learns that the carriage doesn't contain an infant at all, but instead, the woman's husband. In a series of accidents the husband lost his feet, legs, hands and arms. Hostile to a society that rejects and mocks him, the husband grows his hair into a long, tangled wad that leaves nothing visible but his eyes, giving him the appearance of a talking head. With time he becomes more and more antagonistic. Unable to bear his nastiness, the gorgeous wife has her new admirer bind him into a ball and dispose of him, after which the two lovers fall into a passionate embrace.

In "Escapado de la tumba", Casas builds tension by drawing the reader into a nightmarish labyrinth in which fantasy and reality become inseparable. A young man suffers from the recurrent dream that he has killed someone and is being pursued by the Law. No matte how he tries to cover his tracks, some piece of evidence betrays...