I read Comemadre by Roque Larraquy

This novella is made up of a pair of longish short stories that hold off how they connect to each other until pretty far down the line. The first is an incredible mood piece following a doctor in an early 20th century sanitarium, where the owner comes up with a scheme to promote a fake cancer cure to gather many patients willing to donate their bodies to science when it fails. Why? Because he's invented a highly morbid automated guillotine device, that he believes will allow the severed heads approximately 9 seconds to describe what they experience after death. Dr Quintana starts out as seeing himself above the compliant rabble who want to pull in as many desperate dupes as possible for the plan, but ends up making some of the most perverse and substantial contributions to the project's "success..." This part was absorbing and very creepy, but with a wonderful ironic sense of humor.

The second part was a little more difficult to get into. It's a century later, and told from the perspective of a contemporary artist writing notes on a dissertation an art history student has written about his work. What started as an autistic-savant style skill at drawing from childhood transformed in the crucible of the alienation of that scenario into a morbid and controversial art practice drawing on extreme performance and body art. It's an interesting character piece, and while it did come together in the end for me, I was worried it wouldn't, unlike the separate perspectives in Larraquy's also-excellent The National Telepathy, where the narrators of each section and their relation to the central strange phenomena are more immediately clear.

What I like about Larraquy's stuff is the incorporation of different materials and perspectives in a way that feels more mystery-oriented, like found footage films and the media influenced by them, rather than as a kind of reinforcement of truth/reality as this device can sometimes more often function in a novel. I'd say if you are into that kind of thing, you would also really like these books.