The She-Devil in the Mirror is Horacio Castellanos Moya’s funniest, darkest, most terrifying work. A ’typical’ superficial telenovela-like Salvadoran upper-class heroine investigates her friend’s murder and somehow her chattery, strenuously bright account of her adventure and her descent toward madness reveals more about intractable corruption, impunity and pure evil in her country than the usual narrators of such stories–terse, noirish, knowning detectives or journalists, for example–ever could.
Laura Rivera can’t believe what has happened. Her best friend has been killed in cold blood in the living room of her home, in front of her two young daughters! Nobody knows who pulled the trigger, but Laura will not rest easy until she finds out. Her dizzying, delirious, hilarious, and blood-curdling one-sided dialogue carries the reader on a rough and tumble ride through the social, political, economic, and sexual chaos of post-civil war San Salvador. A detective story of pulse-quickening suspense, The She-Devil in the Mirror is also a sober reminder that justice and truth are more often than not illusive. Castellanos Moya’s relentless, obsessive narrator—female, rich, paranoid, wonderfully perceptive, and, in the end, fabulously unreliable—paints with frivolous profundity a society in a state of collapse.
The She-Devil in the Mirror is Horacio Castellanos Moya’s funniest, darkest, most terrifying work. A ’typical’ superficial telenovela-like Salvadoran upper-class heroine investigates her friend’s murder and somehow her chattery, strenuously bright account of her adventure and her descent toward madness reveals more about intractable corruption, impunity and pure evil in her country than the usual narrators of such stories–terse, noirish, knowning detectives or journalists, for example–ever could.
