PREVIEW: GÓMEZ RIVERO’S LUNA PROFUNDA
By Rubén Íñiguez Pérez (*)
Imagine for a moment that the characters from CARRIE speak as they were medieval knights instead of teenagers. If it had been like that, nobody would have taken Stephen King seriously as the master of horror he is. Something similar happens with LUNA PROFUNDA, Ángel Gómez Rivero´s latest novel. A well known author especially for his –debatable quality- essays about fantastic cinema but who has also written novels and short stories. The novel is about a journalist specialized in paranormal issues, who looking for new topics to write about, watches a werewolf film series. As the story goes by, esoteric elements and mythological elements with no suspense or thrill at all appear.
LUNA PROFUNDA pretends to be the master piece about lycanthropy. Since the prologue Gómez RIvero is compared to Poe or Stoker. Anyway, it is a boring monotonous novel that works as an excuse to show the author’s cultural and cinema –especially about werewolves- knowledge. A superficial knowledge by the way. After each chapter one does not know where the story is, only the cast and the movie director who are inside Cine Deodati do. All these quotations show the author’s egomania. The egomania of someone who seems not to know well what he is writing about and only wants to show off about having been able to publish a book.
Talking about the style, the author abuses of the description technique, there is barely narration and the narration we find is slow and without any kind of rhythm. He entertains himself describing situations and settings which give nothing and that are only use to fill the pages with words. He uses long complex sentences and abuses of the of adjectives. Neither does he invite the reader to the reading due to its out-of-fashion vocabulary; in fact, he really invites us to leave it. As I said at the beginning, the language he uses has nothing to do with the age the novel is set in. It is much like a pretentious style that tries to reflect knowledge. I do not know what kind of reader Gómez Rivero had in mind but I do not think there is another audience but is ego.
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Rubén Íñiguez Pérez is a Spanish literature scholar. He has written different articles about horror cinema for several media and he is part of the headquarters of La Mano Film Festival.
