Asmodeus, a thousand-year-old demon with diminishing powers, abandons the body of the forty-something rocker in which he has lived for decades to look for a younger one. In this eventful journey, which leads the ill-fated Asmodeus to bounce from one host to another, a complex plot is built that immerses us in the motley emotional territory of Santo Domingo in 1992: from the local heavy metal scene to the house of an ex-torturer in the service of the Balaguer dictatorship.
The infernal lives of humans thus become entangled with the crazy machinations of angels and demons in this hallucinatory chronicle of a piece of Dominican history. A comedy built from a tangle of tragedies, a metal opera in exquisite tenths, Asmodeo sounds like Héctor Lavoe and Black Sabbath, but also like picaresque and the Golden Age. Quevedo-esque and Calderon-esque to the core, this novel shows that the l...read more