See the shadows swell

Layla Martínez’s debut novel is a claustrophobic slice of domestic horror, steeped in Catholicism and the supernatural, concerning a grandmother and granddaughter who share a haunted house in the barren Spanish interior.

Shunned by neighbours, plagued by the sound of a gnawing “woodworm itch” – “cracracra” – the two characters uneasily coexist with the resident sombras, shadows of the dead. Although these crafty, clattering ghosts now torment them, they once protected the family home “for three years of war and forty more after it ended, when life was just hunger and dust and you couldn’t tell the living from the dead”. As the villagers furtively petition the grandmother, who has a reputation for witchcraft, to locate missing relatives – a legacy of Franco’s dictatorship – the shadows swell with more restless spirits.

In chapters narrated alternately by the house’s two mortal residents, we learn the story of the great-grandfather, a violent pimp who shirked his call-up in the civil war, hiding in a secret cubbyhole that became a fatal prison when his maltreated wife bricked him in. We also discover why reporters are swarming outside: the child of a wealthy local family, the same one the grandmother was forced to serve decades earlier, has vanished from the granddaughter’s care. The granddaughter’s mother disappeared years before – surely twice in one household is no coincidence, the media insinuates.

The bitter, sardonic first-person narratives evoke dramatic monologues (“So listen to me, you lot”), with the mood of simmering dread and resentment recalling Federico García Lorca’s play The House of Bernarda Alba. In Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott’s vigorous translation, Martínez’s language is crude, visceral, sometimes unpunctuated, so sentences seem to splatter across the page: “they both died of sheer loathing sheer contempt sheer bad blood”. Avenging saints and angels “like praying mantises” are presented comically deadpan.

An emerging generation of Spanish women writers such as Sara Mesa and María Bastarós is tackling patriarchy, desire and hidden menace in ordinary lives. Martínez draws on this recent heritage while, as she tells us in her acknowledgements, mining her maternal grandmother’s experiences. She also thanks her mother for “believing in revenge” – a mood that propels the story, along with class anger.

With impressive economy and hurtling intensity, Woodworm emits a howl of fury against entrenched inequality and enforced servitude, and the constraints they place on working-class women. In the gothic tradition the insatiable house becomes a metaphor: for societal structures and the inescapable stranglehold of history, echoing the grandmother’s ominous mantra, “nobody ever leaves”.

Madeleine Feeny is a literary critic and journalist based in London

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