Antes del Volcan

Here we find the rawest and most electric Jon Bilbao. The first three collections of short stories Bilbao published before joining Impedimenta, compiled for the first time in a single volume. The foundation stone of one of the most powerful voices in Spanish short fiction. Before the Volcano is the subterranean map of an eruption. In these stories--taken from three now legendary and largely unavailable books: Like a Story of Terror, Under the Influence of the Comet, and Family Physics, to which three previously unpublished stories are added as bonus tracks--Jon Bilbao explores the moment when everyday life cracks and reveals a fissure. A woman dreams that her house is taken over by squirrels. A father fears the mental architecture of his son. A comet disrupts the rhythm of a coastal town. A couple of voyeurs watch their neighbors read the Bible every night. And always, beneath, lurks the tremor of the unknown: the latent threat, the violence that lurks beneath the visible, the estrangement that besieges the domestic. Before the Volcano brings together the stories with which Jon Bilbao redefined contemporary Spanish short fiction. Stories that oscillate between invisible tension and emotional rift, natural threat and intimate delirium, the gothic and the everyday. Stories that, like still lava, retain their temperature intact. A cartography of the fear that inhabits us. The exact point at which everything begins to move beneath our feet.