By JESUS IGNACIO ALDAPUERTA (Headpress; 1995)
This isn’t a bad book, just an exceedingly oversold one. It’s the first and thus far only English language collection of stories by Jesus Ignacio Aldapuerta, the so-called “Andalusian de Sade” who allegedly specialized in scatological excess. This author, for the record, is almost certainly made-up, but anyway: this book’s gross-out quotient is about equal to that found in the writing of better known practitioners of Sadean literature like James Williamson and Simon Whitechapel (either of whom may actually be responsible for the writing on display here), even if the back cover description proclaims that “to read all the stories of Aldapuerta’s infamous THE EYES is, perhaps in fact, to become mad, or worse” and that “Once read, they will be with you always.”
According to the “nonfiction” introduction by Lucia Teodora, Jesus Ignacio Aldapuerta was a petty thief obsessed with pornography who immolated himself (or was murdered) in 1987. THE EYES is supposedly representative of his many unsavory obsessions, and possibly of his actual crimes. The prose, alas, is only intermittently effective.
The eleven stories collected here all pivot on death and perversion, more often than not in the form of sociopathic individuals who happen upon the aftermath of horrific accidents that inflame those individuals’ psychoses. Particularly representative examples include “Ikarus,” about a Nazi pilot who discovers a woman enclosed in some kind of bizarre torture machine, “Yin & Yang,” in which a man makes weird patterns with the flesh and organs of some frozen corpses he discovers in a crashed plane, and “Orphea,” featuring a nut who fellates himself with a woman’s severed head.
The most effective of THE EYES’ stories, and the only one that really lives up to the grandiose back cover claims, is the startling and repellent “Armful.” It’s about an incarcerated pervert who literally devours a little girl he (rather improbably) finds locked up with him. The poetic grotesquerie of the tale is very much in the vein of the aforementioned James Williamson (a.k.a. James Havoc), yet with a verve that’s fairly unique.