The Lesser Evil

By C E Feiling

The Lesser Evil is a psychological horror novel that takes place in the Buenos Aires of the 1990s featuring exciting prose, fascinating characters, with suspenseful and memorable scenes. Reality, we're told, comprises three dimensions: so-called "wakefulness" (where humans live); the dream world (where, predictably, dreams do); and The Fence--a frontier between the two, which twelve "archons" (human non-dreamers) are meant to protect. Occasionally, "visitors" (vivid dreams only archons can see) show up in large numbers in the realm of wakefulness. This means there's a leak in The Fence--a gap through which a "fugitive" may cross over from the dream world. Fugitives are characters dreamt by someone who should be an archon but hasn't yet been identified; after fully materializing in wakefulness, they wreak havoc on the world at large. Considered the first Argentine horror novel, it is, like the monsters it portrays, a hybrid creature: an extraordinary mix of genre and literary fiction. There is no great work of genre without a thrilling plot, and, within genre, no great work of horror without a blood-curdling one. Feiling's novel hits this double mark--it is, as Luis Chitarroni puts it, both wildly original and legitimately scary. Reminiscent of Angela Carter's Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, it was a finalist for the Planeta Biblioteca del Sur prize.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1628973617
• ISBN13: 9781628973617
• Release Date: May 2020
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Length: 260 Pages