Bernardo Esquinca – The Secret Life Of Insects (2024, translated by James D. Jenkins, illustrations by Luis Pérez Ochando)

“Don’t knock liars: they’re great storytellers. In any case, what you believe says a lot more about you than it does about me. That’s the key to every story.”

“Every storyteller should make his audience uncomfortable, otherwise he runs the risk of leaving them indifferent.”

New Ruins may not have put out loads of titles, but everything they have released has been of extraordinary quality. The Secret Life Of Insects, a collection of short stories by Mexican author Bernardo Esquinca, translated by James D. Jenkins and with illustrations by Luis Pérez Ochando, is no exception. This collection, Esquinca’s second to be translated into English but first to be published in the UK, establishes Esquinca as an exciting and vital voice of the Weird, an expert storyteller and a writer as interested in poking holes in the fabric of story itself as in our consensus reality. Each of these fourteen tales is an exquisitely crafted gem, wonderfully written and profoundly disturbing. James D. Jenkins’ sympathetic translation captures the myriad of voices one might encounter during an Esquinca tale, whilst preserving his essential readability. And Luis Pérez Ochando’s gorgeous illustrations capture wonderfully the stories’ uncanny beauty and pervading sense of menace. This book is an essential read for aficionados of the Weird.

The collection opens with the title story, which perfectly sets out Esquinca’s stall. The story tells of a forensic entomologist, who knows from his field of expertise that when his wife, who was mysteriously murdered in a forest, visited him in his bed on the night of her death she was already dead. Many of Esquinca’s stories are built on such unnerving contradictions – these are stories told by people whose empirical understanding of the world has profoundly contradicted their place in consensus reality, and it is left up to the reader if this is a supernatural incursion, madness, or the character is lying to us. All interpretations leave us profoundly unsettled by the encounter. Many  of Esquinca’s stories tend towards the short – like Borges or Calvino, he is a writer who can achieve remarkable feats of imagination with only a few, expertly chosen words. And like those two, he has a fondness for nested narratives, for invented documents and diaries, for experiments that subtly rewrite the rules of what a short story can or is expected to do.

 Esquinca’s stories hum with sublimated menace. Esquinca is very much aware of Mexico’s bloody history, from the Aztecs to the brutality of colonialism to the modern day drug cartels, and many of his stories show us the legacy of blood and violence returning to haunt the living. We see this particularly in the excellent ‘Tlatelolco Confidential’, told through a series of government reports that reveal an ancient and hungry evil awakening in the form of a zombie outbreak, and in ‘Leprosy in the Walls’, in which the protagonist’s old family home hosts a poisonous sickness that will eventually consume him. There is frequently a sense of cosmic horror and folk horror combined, as Esquinca’s characters unintentionally find themselves waking forces greater than human, particularly in ‘Pan’s Noontide’, in which environmental activists wind up caught up in occult rituals, and ‘Demoness’, a masterful novella in which a high school reunion draws a gang of old friends back to a mysterious episode of possession which has shaped all their lives since. These stories are all the more effective for their recognisable modern-day Mexico settings, for the way in which the characters use their rationality to try and investigate something that turns out not to play by rationality’s rules.

Esquinca is a literary writer, with a strong understanding of the history of genre. ‘Sea of Tranquillity, Ocean of Storms’ spirals out from the old Edgar Allan Poe set-up of a narrator suffering from hereditary madness to evolve into something quite different. Modern horror master Thomas Ligotti is namechecked both in ‘Señor Ligotti’ and ‘The Wizard’s Hour’, whilst H. P. Lovecraft and his creation Cynothoglys are evoked in ‘The Paradoxical Man’. But these are more than just signposts from an author listing his influences. The evocation of Ligotti is quite apt – in many of Esquinca’s tales, there is a Ligottian moment where the author pulls back the curtains on his own story to reveal the strings, implying that reality itself is little more than a tawdry puppet show run by an absent puppeteer. We see this particularly in ‘The Paradoxical Man’ and ‘Señor Ligotti’, both of which are clever meta-horror stories in which the creative act of writing itself is seen to be a ghastly Faustian bargain, the author at the mercy of the twin puppeteers of his creations and his creditors. Similarly in ‘Manuscript Found in an Empty Apartment’, the fate awaiting all those who investigate a mysterious disappearance is their own erasure from the text. 

Many of Esquinca’s most powerful stories hinge on finding the unutterably sinister in the fabric of the mundane. ‘Dream of Me’ is a story about a man who collects dolls with sinister backstories, and the tale expertly unfolds interspersing the nightmarish origins of the dolls with the increasingly sinister truth about its central character. ‘The Wizard’s Hour’ unravels reality itself from the seemingly mundane starting point of a baby’s chair. And the brilliant ‘Where I’m Going, It’s Always Night’, haiku-like in its brevity and its immaculate construction, is a scary story told by a hitchhiker that refuses to resolve – whether or not the hitchhiker is lying, the psychic damage is done. ‘The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife’ is the disintegration of a marriage in close up, in which the alien erotic fascination of the estranged wife is an octopus. And ‘Come to Me’ mixes the old familiar elements of Weird storytelling, a love spell and ironic wish fulfilment, and twists it into its most macabre form. These stories, all brief, demonstrate just how much Esquinca can achieve in a couple of pages.

The Secret Life of Insects is a brilliant collection, one that shows an exciting new writer immersed in the history of the Weird but unafraid to take bold and surprising risks and experiments with form. Esquinca is a master of the modern Weird tale, and I can only hope that this will see more of his work published in English for us Anglophone Weird enthusiasts. Essential. 

The Secret Life of Insects is available now. You can order your copy HERE