Tales of fear form a genre of their own, nameless children of that personified “Fear” once spoken of in popular Catalan tradition before the Civil War. Monsters of the imagination and very real criminals meet in this category: beings and events from the distant past as well as the present, with contemporary stories expressing the anxieties of our own age just as older tales gave form to the fears of those who came before us.

Fear, the bastard and rejected daughter of tragedy, belongs to no single narrative genre or style. It emerges wherever nihilistic violence breaks into the protagonist’s world without any comprehensible reason —through chance, self-interest or pure pleasure— and forces open the boundaries of what we imagine to be ordinary, safe and free from danger. In old legends, Fear wore a white burial shroud. Today it may wear the supposedly friendly hand of someone behind an empty mask you will never learn to read, someone who wishes only to devour you from within.