Memento Mori

Author: César Pérez Gellida
- Fiction
- Suma de Letras
- ISBN: 9786071134851
- Release Date: 04-14-2015
-Reviewed by: Félix Lizárraga

Memento Mori (“Remember that you will die”) is César Pérez Gellida’s debut novel and the first of a trilogy.

Gellida’s novel follows the Dan Brown style thriller formula (not created by Dan Brown, of course, but his is a recognizable name) to a T: a narrative fragmented into multiple points of view, a more or less personable detective, a suitable love interest, a conspiracy theory, and so forth, complete with a map of the city of Valladolid, where most of the action of the book takes place. The identity and motives of the serial killer in question are revealed almost from the very beginning, so the main question is how the detective is going to put two and two together –plus a couple of additional twists that I will not go into here. 

As a thriller, it is competently if formulaically done. It even features the journalistic, thankless prose that comes with the territory, although interweaved here and there with literary allusions, some more welcome than others. The fact that it takes the police half the book to realize that a witness called Gregorio Samsa (with a company called Metamorphosis Software, no less) is a fake one, and probably the killer himself, is for me one of the high points of the book (not to mention entirely plausible). However, the contrivance of a proverb-spouting detective called Sancho grows tiresome after a while.

The killer is not only well read, but obsessed with music, and even sings and dances his favorite songs at the scene of his murders. That in itself is a bit much, at least to me, but –to add insult to injury—every time the killers breaks into of his sing-along, dance-with-me moments (and there is a myriad of them) the author includes the entire lyrics of the song in question, and, in case you missed it, a soundtrack at the end of the book. It makes one wonder: What is this, exactly? Hannibal, The Musical?

The inclusion of the soundtrack at the end, aptly labeled “Banda Sonora” (Soundtrack), and the slug lines at the beginning of each section make clear that the author has conceived and structured his book as a sort of screenplay, rather than a novel, which is not exactly a novelty (not since at least Aldous Huxley’s Ape and Essence) but works well in this case, especially given the big cinematic influences in the genre.

The worst trait of this particular killer, though, is that he writes dreadful poetry –and I do mean dreadful. The detective’s love interest, a brainy and sensual psycholinguist who teaches literature, declares it not too bad –a mind-boggling assertion, but there you have it. Luckily for his victims, he only recites his poems to them after they are already dead. One can never be too thankful for small mercies.

All in all, Memento Mori is an efficient thriller that achieves what it sets out to do. It is readable (except for the killer’s poetry), and even has a built-in soundtrack, if you are into that sort of thing. It also plays with some intriguing ideas (which again I cannot go into here without spoiling it for you). True, the characters go barely a step beyond the stereotype, coincidences are perhaps too pat, the bad guys are practically omniscient, but those shortcomings are shared by most of the genre. It is entertaining, and who knows, it might even spawn its own TV series.

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