Hybrid Vigils

"Andrs Garca knows that man is the monster and that the beast inhabits him perpetually. He knows, too, that palpitating within every oddity is the shadow of death and the burden of solitude that it imposes. The characters of these stories are mixed beings, shaken by the eccentricity of feeling incomplete, anomalous, ugly.... And what they ultimately strive to relate is not just their own suffering, but rather the suffering of contemporary humanity."

Thus does acclaimed Colombian author Pablo Montoya Campuzano introduce us to the fabulous beings of the nine short stories in this collection. Whether springing from universes indistinguishable from the future of our own, or tinged with influences as diverse as Homerian epics, One Thousand and One Nights, magic realism, existentialism, and Gothic fiction, the characters of Hybrid Vigils reflect, as closely as we do, the myriad definitions and interpretations of "contemporary humanity". These stories are also hybrids in that they blur boundaries-between reality and the oneiric, between the concrete and myth, and between history and science fiction. On each page they demonstrate a debt to many authors from various eras, nationalities, and even ideologies. The reader would not be wrong to sense the influence of Borges, Calvino, Camus, Dostoyevsky, Ende, Garca Mrquez, Goethe, Herbert, Hesse, Jnger, Kafka, Lem, Schwob, Tolkien, or Yourcenar. Without the work of such artists these pages would not exist, since the hybrid nature of these stories stems from a very simple proposition: whether it relates to literature or to the million possibilities for the future of our species, little could be as creative as mlange, and nothing could be as sterile as an obsession with purity.