Blood Crime
Sebastià Alzamora
2012, Spain
Translated from Catalan by Maruza Relaño and Martha Tennent, 2016
This is the problem of human freedom: as soon as an individual believes he has attained it, the first thing he does is concentrate on eliminating his congeners. Order is reestablished when another person takes his life; almost without exception, order entails repressing the appetite for crime by committing another crime. That is why, more than anything else, war is the simultaneous fulfillment of the desire to kill accrued to all the individuals of a generation. A moment of collective deliverance, an enormous, devastating sigh exhaled from the depths of the souls of victims and executioners alike.
It is hard at first to know how to categorize Blood Crime. Is it a thriller, a vampire story, historical fiction, a war novel? It is all of these things, and so it is ultimately a horror novel of the most serious sort: a literary indictment of man’s capacity for evil.
Blood Crime is set in the opening months of Spain’s Civil War, focused on Barcelona and the horrors perpetrated there. Against a backdrop of bombings and political intrigues and murders–or massacres–a crime is committed that stands out even amid war’s horrors. An old priest and a young boy are both brutally murdered and drained of their blood. There are those who believe it to be the work of a monster, a vampire. And those who cannot believe, for there are already too many things too terrible to comprehend, how to add one more?
But fantasy monsters of various types and stripes linger, echoes of Dracula and Frankenstein, Gothic terrors, whose horrors become tame in comparison of the depravity of the minds of men–depravities justified in the name of War and Power.
Freedom, courage, and boldness, went the song, and it sounded like sarcasm to Brother Darder. Though, come to think of it, was was a colossal macabre joke. Brothers sacrificing brothers, parents informing on children, and children killing parents or having them killed; merchants of misery and whoremasters of death, gossipmongers of crime and peddlers of depravation. (Part 3)
There are glimpses of light throughout, however. The Mother Abbess’s tender concern for Sister Concepció, a young novice tormented in mind and spirit by the war and an impossible request, and with a looming danger she isn’t even aware of. Though the darkness closes in, both Sister Concepció’s very youth and the compulsion of those around her to protect her provide hope. There is the belief that man can effect positive change–despite war’s evidence to the contrary–championed by both Judge Carbonissa and Doctor Pellicer. The steady moral principles of Superintendent Muñoz, even in the face of unbeatable odds. These and other examples combine to bring a bit of uplift to an otherwise dark story. And in turn hope, that no matter how monstrous a person may turn, there will be those fighting against such monstrosity.
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