In Havana, with most travelers gone and agencies pausing trips, the city faces a rare supply crisis. The scene echoes from the authors’ latest blockbuster, Carmen Mola, a collaboration by Jorge Díaz, Agustín Martínez, and Antonio Mercero. The work unveils a new Carmen Mola style of historical‑Gothic storytelling, maintaining its signature brutality without sacrificing its psychological edge. What began as a standalone narrative has evolved into a saga that expands beyond the events of 1834, tracing a dramatic arc that follows Elizabeth’s ascendancy and the figures who shaped a turbulent era.
The setting shifts to Madrid, thirty years later, where the monarch’s allies are fading and a conspiratorial network begins to pull toward the Caribbean wealth of Cuba. On the island, luxury and power shine, yet the prosperity is built on slave labor, tolerated by colonial rule even as the peninsula bans it at home. The narrative takes readers to sugar mills where the cane is cut to the rhythm of whips, steering the tale toward a hellish landscape suggested by the novel’s title. The authors place Florentine brutality at the heart of the seventh part, delivering scenes of intense violence that test even the most hardened reader.
XIX as a vein
Between breaks and conversations, a National hotel becomes a focal point. It is a place where Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner share a honeymoon, where Lucky Luciano attends to matters of state, and where the city’s streets—partly renewed through UNESCO support—bear witness to a complex past. Imagining the once war‑scarred avenues as the novel’s panorama requires a bold leap, yet the authors pull it off with vivid detail. “When we wrote The Monster, we immersed ourselves in the nineteenth century,” says Díaz, who leans into the historical weave that anchors the trio’s work. The planet has found its voice, the book has found its audience, and the team plans to extend the historical arc across a century that high school rarely covered but which remains deeply captivating because of coups and revolutions, networks of resistance, and shifting alliances. “That’s why Cuba matters to the story, given Spain’s lingering ties.”
A cherished, tiny book passed down by Martínez’s great‑grandfather—a relic from a moment when many Spaniards found themselves in Cuba—offers songs and verses that helped lift soldier morale. Those original lyrics echo through the narrative, with Bayamesa becoming a remembered anthem for independence fighters.
Semi-enslaved colonists
Although the novel aims to entertain, it engages with slavery’s legacy and its echoes in popular fiction today. Actors like Carlos Bardem have noted that the story doesn’t pretend to be a history textbook; instead, it presents a piece of the past and invites readers to draw their own conclusions. The writers see a connection between African slaves and other exploited workers drawn into colonial economies, including Galician and Asturian settlers. The narrative threads through semi‑slavery and existing trafficking networks, revealing how desperation and coercion shaped lives. Recent real‑world parallels—such as the discovery of victims in enclosed transports—underscore the timeless relevance of these themes.
Migration carried shimmering promises and hard truths alike. Havana offered wealth and illusion in equal measure. The authors recall how newly arrived Spaniards sometimes rented a suit to send a glossy image back home, only to have that image hollow once the truth was understood. The Cuba depicted is a chiaroscuro of splendor and squalor, with a murder series that doubles as a puzzle. The villains drive the narrative with a relentless and unsettling tenacity, leaving readers unsettled and hooked. Díaz admits a fondness for brutality, confessing that the trio drew on classic nineteenth‑century Gothic tales and Stevenson’s influences to heighten the sense of fear that grows as the central couple fights to sustain their love.
Anticipation runs high for the trilogy’s reception—two million copies already in readers’ hands—yet the authors proceed cautiously about where the story will land next. If the time jumps stay at roughly three decades, a future installment could land in a late twentieth‑century setting, a deliberately dark playground for Carmen Mola. The authors tease possibilities without revealing their exact plans.