Safe Return Doubtful

translated from the Spanish (Colombia) by Victor Meadowcroft

Published by New Directions in May 2024

An elderly man is searching for something, though we are not aware of what until almost half way through. His travels take him to a bizarre town shrouded in mist, where mice carcasses lie rotting in the street, boys play football with a human head, and children laugh, then disappear.
In hypnotic prose and just 88 pages Rosero packs in a huge amount of dread and terror.
There is some sort of mystery unfolding in this town, but for the reader, the sense of mystery is even greater; who is the narrator? why is he here? how did he get here?

The story opens with the man being shown to his room in the town’s hotel. The landlady says it is ‘a sort of coffin’, with a single, lopsided painting of the pale and bloodied face of Jesus Christ, with one eye faded by the damp. ‘Exactly like Christ winking at you’. She then sits in the doorframe and watches the man until he is asleep.

The writing is harsh and simple, which makes the undercurrent of horror all the more effective. It reads more like an allegory than a straightforward narrative. Only three of the characters are named, the others just referred to by their occupation, the landlady, the shopkeeper, and the cart-driver.
Its allegorical content is greater as the plot is vague, though themes of loss, grief and searching are evident.

Nothing is as it seems. It’s a novel to savour, and to bask in its bizarreness and its despair.

My GoodReads score 5 / 5