UK cover, design by Jack Smyth

I came across this book in the old-fashioned way of going into a book shop and browsing till something grabbed me—something I don’t do so much nowadays, largely because of the length of my to-read shelf. First published in Chile in 2016, it was translated into English by Natasha Wimmer in 2021, and is Fernández’s sixth novel. (I almost bought her fifth—and the only other one currently translated into English—2013’s Space Invaders, which also makes use of a pop-cultural metaphor to examine the effects of living under a repressive regime.)

The unnamed narrator of The Twilight Zone is a documentary editor who becomes fascinated by the figure of Andrés Antonio Valenzuela Morales, a former soldier in General Pinochet’s regime who one day walked into a newspaper office, asked to speak to a journalist, and made “the terrible declaration nobody had made before: I TORTURED PEOPLE.” Throughout the novel, he’s referred to not by his name but as “the man who tortured people”; nevertheless he is, in a sense, the novel’s hero, not because he took part in the unlawful detention, torture and murder of political prisoners, but because he was the one who, after being sickened by his job for too long, spoke out. His interview, published internationally, becomes the first to break the silence around the regime’s methods, and can be seen, then, as the start of its demise. (And, I was surprised to find, Morales is a real man, and his confessional interview a real event.)

(Looks more like The Time Tunnel than The Twilight Zone…)

After deciding to write about Morales, the narrator proceeds to relate a series of episodes in the history of her country, going through three layers to each tale. First, she presents the story—always one of “forcible disappearance, detention, abduction, torture”—as it was known at the time by the families, friends, and communities of the people who disappear. And this is usually all about the lead-up to the moment of the disappearance, followed simply by mystery and silence. The people who disappear either remain disappeared—often, not even their bodies are found—or, if they come back, return changed, silent, in one case even having given themselves over to the government and joined the oppressors.

Secondly, there’s the tale as told by Morales. He, often, knew what happened to these people because he was there, not as one of the main instigators, but as a soldier following orders: guarding the prisoners, making sure they didn’t talk to one another (or, for instance, making sure they couldn’t sit down for a given period), or being there when they were killed, making sure the bodies couldn’t be identified, then burying them or dumping them in the river.

And then, thirdly, comes the narrator’s layer, where she frankly and openly brings her imagination to the story (some passages begin “I know—I’m not imagining”, to clearly identify which parts are real and which are invented), adding in the missing human details that are otherwise lost: what the people were feeling or thinking about on the day they were taken, what Morales felt as he carried out his orders, and so on.

One of the Twilight Zone episodes explicitly referred to in the novel, “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine” (series 1, episode 4) with Ida Lupino

This is a novel about the importance of stories. We know how repressive regimes control the truth, often by outright denial of facts and the elimination of anyone who questions their version of events; but this is about the other side of the matter, where the bereaved need to be able to tell stories about what happened. The disappearances, the lack of even a body to provide a full-stop to the tale, otherwise leave these stories floundering. Morales’ opening up about his crimes is, in this novel, a treasure chest of lost or completed stories, even if they’re all about terrible things. At least now the stories can be told in full, and not just as cold facts and statistics, but as human tales, however tragic.

The narrator several times turns to the TV show The Twilight Zone to explain the strange air around these stories: sudden disappearances into a place beyond reach require “another dimension. A world forever hidden by that old trick that makes us look the other way”. But, in Pinochet’s regime, “that parallel and invisible universe was real, not some fantastic invention.” Morales, then, becomes a sort of implicated Rod Serling, guiding the ordinary people of Chile into the world of the lost and disappeared.

As the novel is set thirty years after Pinochet’s rule, it takes place in less repressive times, but times when the recovery and preservation of memory—of precisely these twilight-zone stories—is so important, so that the dead get their proper memorial, and such abuses of power do not happen again.

It was the idea of the TV show The Twilight Zone being applied, as a metaphor, to a repressive regime that drew me to this book. In the end, Fernández didn’t turn to the metaphor as much as I’d have liked. The TV show isn’t always brought in to every story told in the novel, so there’s no gradual deepening or exploration of the metaphor. In fact it gets a little watered down when Fernández turns to classic ghost stories as well, which felt, to me, less striking, and so less thought-provoking—though Frankenstein is used quite effectively at one point, as an illustration of pieced-together memories attaining a power of their own:

“The women’s cries awaken memory, set it in conversation with the present, raise it from the crypt, and breathe life into it, resuscitating a creature fashioned from scraps, from bits of different people, from fragments of yesterday, and today. The monster wakes and announces itself with an uncontainable howl, taking everyone by surprise, shaking those who thought they were comfortable, problematising, conflictualising, provoking. And this is the dangerous primal state in which it should remain.”

There’s something in the idea of imagination as one of the few weapons the truly powerless have against an otherwise overwhelming repressive regime. I wrote a bit about it in my piece on Pan’s Labyrinth, though there it seemed a last refuge and a desperate measure. Here, imagination is used to turn fragments and memories into stories—and stories are how we, as humans, process the world. How to weigh this against the use of “imagination” (if that’s the correct term) by those in power—who deny facts, and appeal to emotive myths to drive people to violent action—is perhaps not explored in this novel. But it’s perhaps wrong to apply the word “imagination” to what are really just lies. Here, imagination is an individual, humanising thing, of a different nature altogether.