BOOK REVIEW THE DOORWAY Author: Manel Loureiro From the reader report by: Anette Lang-Coiro La puerta is the latest mystery thriller by Galician author Manel Loureiro, who has already been called “the Spanish Stephen King”. Although this novel does not stand out by language of extraordinary quality, certainly those who love the genre will appreciate the thrilling page turner which leaves much space for the supernatural and occult, certainly not least because of its local colour, and it may well be that they are going to prefer it from a US-American counterpart. […] Accordingly, both the Puerta del Más Allá and Monte Seixo are real places […]. The deserted villages, the crumbling infrastructure and the dismissive old people of the region provide a perfect background for the novel. Particularly beautiful in the context of the references to the region are precisely those passages where, as a matter of course, the local colour becomes part of the action, such as the moment when Raquel researches old newspapers for ritual crimes in the past and instead finds the Caudillo on the front page. Accordingly, the Francoist press attributes several bloody incidents to marauding groups of Republicans who are said to be still roaming in the region. Also, much of the mood of the novel is due to the fact that during every single day of the about two weeks of the framework of action it is raining cats and dogs and that all the protagonists are constantly struggling with Galicia’s bad weather. In the German-speaking countries, for quite some time crime novels with a regional touch have been very popular.
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