Book Review

Two Lines Press, the award-winning San Francisco-based publisher renowned for its focus on original literature in translation, offers readers an intriguing new release: a horror novel by Spanish author Layla Martínez.

Woodworm (Carcoma, in Spanish) tells the story of a grandmother and her granddaughter, confined within the claustrophobic walls of a haunted house nestled in a remote corner of Spain. This house, passed down through generations of their family, becomes the setting for a tense, multi-generational drama. The two women narrate their experiences in alternating chapters, revealing lives marked by poverty, resentment, and a pervasive sense of injustice. The unhappiness that has plagued the women in this family for generations now reaches a breaking point. As events spiral out of control, the question looms: who will bear the consequences?

In her debut novel, Martínez delves into the horror genre, capitalizing on its recent surge in popularity. She skillfully blends traditional horror tropes with comedic elements, weaving a multi-layered feminist narrative that is both chilling and thought-provoking.

At the heart of the story lies a ghost-infested house, a quintessential hallmark of gothic horror:

I walked in and the house pounced on me. It’s always the same with this filthy pile of bricks, it leaps on whoever comes through the door and twists their guts till they can’t even breathe. . . . In here, you lose your teeth, your hair, the meat from your bones and if you’re not careful you’ll end up dragging yourself around on all fours, or else permanently bedbound.

Doors, wardrobes, and even walls take on lives of their own, yet the hardened grandmother and granddaughter remain mostly unperturbed, confronting the house’s malevolence with resilience and grit. Accustomed to a life of constant fear, while also channeling the misery of their unfortunate predecessors, they simply shrug it all off and push forward. This contrast creates a dark humor that often crescendos into moments of outright hilarity:

. . . I was left alone with the wardrobe again. I could feel it was ravenous, desperate. Like a dog in a pen, like a horse that’s been hobbled. When I walked past it to follow the old woman out, the wood creaked. It was goading me into opening the door, the little shit, but I was wise to its tricks.

The house also serves as a metaphor of patriarchal violence: It was built by the grandmother’s father, a heartless character who ran a brothel and confined his wife there to both work for him and bear his children. Enduring relentless beatings, the wife eventually resolved to put an end to her torment. One fateful day, she entombed him within the walls of the house, making him the first in a series of restless ghosts to haunt the property.

Adding a further paranormal twist, the grandmother practices a form of Catholic witchcraft, blending angelic invocations with sinister curses. Unfortunately, the angels she summons bear little resemblance to their traditional, iconic imagery:

. . . angels don’t have blonde curls or beautiful faces. They’re more like giant insects, like praying mantises. And so my grandma abandoned her prayers, because who wants four mantises with hundreds of eyes and pincers for mouths showing up at their daughter’s bedside?

She also feels a deep kinship with several women saints, particularly those who endured their own share of hardships in life:

The prayers slid from her teeth and I couldn’t hear them but I knew she was calling on Santa Bárbara beheaded by her father on a mountain, Santa Cecilia plunged into boiling water, Santa María Goretti murdered during an attempt rape, and all her other saints who died at the hands of angry men.

Her favorite is likely Santa Gemma, with whom she enjoys sharing a glass of wine from time to time—a saint who, when needed, is more than willing to handle meddlesome neighbors.

Class violence emerges as another central theme in this multifaceted novella. The protagonists and their ancestors come from a lineage of poverty, living in isolation with no access to resources or education. For them, Madrid is but a distant dream. They have long been exploited by the rich and powerful local family, the Jarabos.

At the start of her narration, the granddaughter has just been released by the police after having been accused of involvement in the disappearance of the youngest Jarabos child, Guillermo, whom she had been babysitting. The entire town—where the unfortunate protagonists have rarely forged any positive connections—is now more hostile toward them than ever:

Most people found us disgusting. And they hated us, too, with a syrupy hatred that stuck to the roofs of their mouths and dribbled down their chins while they argued about us on camera. Others felt sorry for us, saying we were sick in the head and social services should come and take the old woman away, and maybe me too, since I seemed a little loopy or a bit slow or at least not normal enough.

In this charged atmosphere, the protagonists’ voices are unmistakably angry and ebullient. They need to vent their frustrations, grapple with despair, and face the absence of anyone willing to listen. Their sentences pour out like hot lava, unstoppable and raw, flowing directly onto the page for us to read. The translation captures this energy beautifully, with language and style that preserve the immediacy of spoken word, making this little book an even more compelling page-turner.

Language can also become a tool of class violence, as seen when Guillermo Jarabo’s mother disdainfully complains to a peer that her son is starting to speak like the locals:

My husband and I thought it would be a good idea to raise him out here in the countryside for the early years, with the horses and vineyards, before choosing a good school, so he wouldn’t spend all his time staring at a screen, but the other day he said comío instead of comido and I swear I almost packed my bags there and then.

Like the grandmother and her story—drawn from the real-life experiences of the author’s maternal grandmother, as noted in the Acknowledgments section—the reference to the Jarabos is rooted in reality. This family historically supported General Franco’s dictatorship, introducing a third and most profound layer of violence and horror to the book. It is the historic violence of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and the subsequent 36 years of dictatorship, which ended with Franco’s death in 1975. This period left a lasting trauma on Spain, with an alarming number of victims still lying in unmarked mass graves and thousands of desaparecidos whose fates remain unknown.

This enduring tragedy was recently brought to the big screen by Pedro Almodóvar in the poignant closing scenes of Parallel Mothers (2021), where an entire village gathers around an exhumed mass grave to finally mourn their loved ones and give them a proper burial.

Ultimately, all this brutality surrounding the unnamed protagonists begins to consume them from within, forcing them to confront a critical choice: to succumb to it or fight against it. In the granddaughter’s words:

. . . the rage was gnawing away at me like woodworm and I don’t know if the shadows put it there between whispers in the night or if it came to my head of its own accord but that doesn’t matter because either way I knew I had to get it out.