Pandemic and Politic Violence in «Allá afuera hay monstruos» by Edmundo Paz Soldán

Abstract

After the publication of Los días de la peste (2017) a premonitory novel that anticipated the global pandemic of covid 19, the writer Edmundo Paz Soldán brings a new work about the horrors that derivated from the virus propagation (that is called «bug») titled Allá afuera hay monstruos (2021). Placed in an civic war distopic world, Paz Soldán recreates with master hand the lack of sanitary equipment, the economic tensions derivated from the lockdown, the social revolts, the informative contamination, the leadership of the anti vaccine movements and the messianic pseudo scientists with miraculous remedies to battle the pandemic. The work is inspired and it is a tribute to Cartucho (1931), a book of short stories about the Mexican revolution by the writer Nelli Campobello.