Praise for Ríiacute;o Muerto
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"Among this novel's merits is its powerful celebration of the will to live, dovetailed with an evocation of the love members of a family have for one another, even under the most brutal and apparently hopeless circumstances." -The Arts Fuse
"Río Muerto is a superb short novel that bridges the gap between horror and crime in very unique ways. Río Muerto is a window into a violent world as well as a tale about a family suffering at the hands of paramilitarism and bad neighbors. Silva Romero is a star in Colombia and hopefully this, his first novel to be translated to English, will put him on the map and ensure we get more of his work soon."—Gabino Iglesias, CrimeReads
"Colombian writer Silva Romero makes his English-language debut with a wrenching tale of murder and survival. Near the remote Colombian town of Belen del Chami, a mute man named Salomon Palacios is gunned down by hooded assassins in 1992. His distraught widow, Hipolita, sets off on a rambling odyssey of retribution, accompanied by their sons Max, 12, and Segundo, eight. Salomon, meanwhile, has become a ghost, and he meets with the ghosts of other victims of political violence. Romero captures the intensity of the family’s grief, as they’re poorly consoled by a gravedigger and are ignored by the police, all while Salomon shadows them, unable to intervene. Silva Romero seamlessly weaves lyrical depictions of Salomon’s afterlife, a "dense, black, clammy, stinking jungle that looked to him like hell," with pointed observations of the country’s decades-long guerrilla war, which “continues to break the extraordinary open hearts of thousands of Colombians.” Meadowcroft’s crystalline translation introduces readers to an important Latin American voice. (Feb.)"—Publishers Weekly
“In this novel, Silva Romero explores with clarity and precision the way violence weighs on a society like Colombia, which seems to have naturalized it in a disturbing way."—ADN Bogotáaacute;
“Written in visceral prose.” —El Tiempo
“A book that will persist as a key representative of literature dealing with the violence that devastated this country during the armed conflict.” —El Espectador
“Río Muerto is a portrait of Colombia turned into a book, a work we should have in our homes and read with our families instead of watching the news bulletins. (…) This short novel by Ricardo Silva Romero encapsulates a hope beyond the kind revealed in the story itself: the kind of hope that reflects the power of contemporary Colombian fiction to convert the horror of war into literary art.” —Diario de Paz Colombia
“In Río Muerto, Ricardo Silva Romero recreates in poetic and intense prose another side of the horror of our era.” —Abisinia Review
Praise for Ricardo Silva Romero
“El Espantapájaros is a horror novel. It relates a kind of horror that is intimate and painful because it is ours, the kind we see in the news, a kind we know takes place every day in this country: it is the story of a massacre.R
