An author and editor from Castrillón offers in The Factory of Bodies a tribute to what once fueled a fixation: animated drawings, pulp literature, B-movies, Z-movies, and the giallo horror cinema that runs through it all. Above all, it honors the person who carried these influences into cinematic scripts and transformed them into literary narratives more than twenty years ago. The floor is opened for reflection through her words.
“The Factory of Bodies,” she explains, “is a collection of stories built around my obsession with identity. When someone writes, they gather questions that trouble them, often lingering in the background of the stories. It does not always matter whether the reader notices every nuance; these questions form the architecture of the tales. At times the reader can simply enjoy a book as a sequence of scattered adventures with peculiar characters drawn from the most improbable realities or from the authentic underground. Humor becomes a handy tool to cradle any worry and deliver it back as a palatable experience. Tired of things once hard won, I pulled these pieces out of the box—pieces of horror, science fiction, and animation—drawn from the cinema of the low-budget era or the often absurd and existential Z-series. They were previously drafted for audiovisual formats and have been reshaped into prose while preserving the cinematic storytelling and its dynamism, even when not heavily descriptive and firmly rooted in action.”
The idea of identity, she notes, “is more present than ever in times defined by acceleration and rapid change, a relentless demand to update in professional life as artificial intelligence enters broader use, and social media push us to project an appearance different from who we are. There is a lurking risk of losing one’s own creativity, cognition, and rationality to machines. Yet the challenge remains the same: identity is a construct built from what we believe we are, what we want to become, or sometimes from what we fear becoming. It reflects our tastes, experiences, and the gaps we try to fill with love for ourselves that is authentic, real, deep, and stable.” The stories then wander through lines like “Mr. Bad Jones, evil is out of fashion,” “You are a worm,” “A horse named Toulouse,” “Heads,” “Stomach killer,” “W, the factory of bodies,” inviting readers to open the box and explore.