Author: Ángel Gutierrez, David Zurdo
- Fiction
- Planeta
- ISBN: 9788445000458
- Release Date: 03-13-2012
-Reviewed by: Sara Martínez
La torre prohibida is Jack Winger's story told in chapters alternating between two distinct moments that converge by the end – one storyline follows the events leading up to his family’s murder and the other storyline the events following the murder. The pre-murder narrative features Jack as a man becoming increasingly fearful and paranoid as he seeks the answer to strange and mysterious happenings. The post-murder narrative finds Jack in a clinic full of amnesiacs who suffer from horrible nightmares where he seeks the answer to strange and mysterious happenings. The answer he finds turns out to be anticlimactic and predictable for the reader.
The novel is told from Jack's point of view with occasional disconcerting deviations: at times the point of view switches to Julia, the woman he befriends in the clinic that later becomes his lover [and also could be construed to be his mother from hints on the last page]. Jack is a journalist who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Jack’s character is the only one that is fully developed, all the others are types – the beautiful wife, the cute son; or stereotypes – the wise, old, mystical Indian.
Well-written psychological thrillers are always of interest and this novel could potentially find a niche. The setting is reminiscent of novels by Tony Hillerman or Rudolfo Anaya, novels set in the Southwestern U.S. that rely on a certain amount of magic realism. Those novels, however, are of the culture while La torre prohibida tries to use it. Its setting and characters thus seem inauthentic. The pacing is slow and while there were cliff-hangers and intriguing plot shifts and tricks, they are not enough to hold the reader’s interest.
The plot device, the answer that Jack discovers at the end is that he is stuck in some kind of purgatory and forced to re-live the same horrific events millions of times over [as are all of those condemned to the ‘clinic’] could be seen as a ‘mash-up’ of The Shining by Stephen King [an protagonist going slowly insane and trucking with ghosts/demons] and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey [a horrific mental institution as setting]. The novel can also be compared to Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane – the protagonist is mentally unstable and it is also set in a clinic. Unfortunately, Torre prohibida doesn’t deliver the internal logic, suspense or terror of any of these masterpieces.
