Entertainment
Thrillers Suffused With a Dark Sense of Dread
Our critic on the month’s best releases.
Sometimes the scariness in a book lies in the uncertainty between what is real and what is imagined. A dark sense of dread pervades two of this month’s thriller offerings; the third is a rollicking but suspenseful story about, of all things, the illicit trade in rare birds’ eggs.
Your Steps on the Stairs
by Antonio Muñoz Molina; translated by Curtis Bauer
An unnamed man, recently relocated to Lisbon from New York, is waiting for his beloved wife to join him in their new apartment. “I’m using my time to make all the preparations for when Cecilia arrives,” he says. So begins YOUR STEPS ON THE STAIRS (Other Press, 298 pp., paperback, $18.99), an anxious, unconventional thriller by Muñoz Molina, a literary superstar in Spain.
The earth is getting hotter everywhere, and the narrator sees his new home as a refuge, physically as well as emotionally. “If the world is going to come to an end, there’s no better place to wait for it to end than here,” he says. He still hasn’t recovered — and who has, really? — from the trauma of being in downtown Manhattan during the attack on the World Trade Center.
As he falls deeper into his own mind, his unease fueled by the news, the internet and the books he’s obsessively reading, he begins to conflate Lisbon and New York, to lose track of where he is. Similarly, the past spills into the present.
Is it a coincidence that the absent Cecilia is an expert on how fear affects memory and a sense of time? “I have a good memory for things but not always in the order in which they happened,” he says. Maybe that’s why he never fully explains why he was summarily fired from his high-paying job. “Cecilia says that sometimes I lack the ability for self-reflection,” he says.
