¡Vuela mi mente!
Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino
by contemporary Mexican author Julián Herbert - nine short stories and
one novella collected here, stories that zoom along in hallucinogenic
overdrive, stories that will - this time in English - blow your mind.
In
one story, an artist agonizes over the prospect that his ghastly
pornography will actually wind up as a killing machine; in another
piece, a conceptual artist picks sheet music from his teeth only to find
out the hard way his creation is anything but original; in yet another,
the title work, the narrator, a film critic, watches as the front door
of his house is blown out by a bazooka. He's then taken to the secret
lair of a drug king to discuss, among other topics, creativity, art and
the aesthetics of postmodernism.
And here are the opening lines from three more JH blasters:
The Ballad of Mother Teresa of Calcutta: “Stop kidding yourself: that thing you call “human experience” is just a massacre of onion layers.”
M.L. Estefanía:
“I was forty years old and smoking between twenty and thirty rocks a
week when I transformed myself into Marcial Lafuente Estefanía.”
The Roman Wedding: “There isn’t a single car left in the Cadereyta prison lot, and the sun is beating down like a bottle-blow to the head.” 
To share a more specific hit of what you'll encounter, I'll turn to a batch of direct quotes from one remarkable story, White Paper, dedicated to multidisciplinary artist Carlos Amorales (thus the pics of the artist's work).
WHITE PAPER
"They
brought us here with the promise that we'd get some hands-on
experience. Our specialty is crime-scene analysis. This particular scene
has become a labyrinth. The house has been purified."
"A pale
powder covers the furniture and the fixtures in the bathroom and
kitchen. It's as if a whole family had been massacred in a tub of
whitewash." 
"We
don't know who we are, what authority we have to be here, or when our
task will be completed. We don't even know one another."
"In
contrast to the flush of dawn on the outer edges of the investigation,
our identities are obscure. And what's more, we're hemmed in by music
that prevents us from going outdoors, even to the garden." 
"They
say that the curtains are evidence: one more white spatter pattern that
bleeds into everything. Others think we are ghosts: murder victims
eternally trapped in the private residence of our extinction. Yet others
doubt if it's that simple: it would be easier if we were just ghosts
rather than witnesses for the prosecution."
"The one indication
that we might be dead is our recognition that we are on the verge of
insanity: madness is the nearest thing to being a ghost." 
"We
have no idea how big the garden is, which is why we don't dare venture
across it: what if the music were to catch up with us and slice us in
two before we reached the street?"
"We're only human: from time
to time we amuse ourselves with vain pastimes. The other day, in the
garbage (despite having been purified by white spatter patterns, the
house is still a monumental trash heap), we found a cardboard box
containing hundreds of transparent spinning tops....We put aside the
tweezers, cameras, and precision rulers to sit on the floor and spin
tops. We watched them dance under the light of our flashlights, placed
bets, and held tournaments until the room was, in forensic terms, a
dunghill."
"It's an aggressive plan but destruction has its own
music. Soon we'll be free: when the walls fall and the ceilings of the
crime scene we're investigating finally gives way and descend on our
heads." 
Here's
critic Chris R. Morgan on these Julián Herbert tales: "Sophisticated
protagonists convene with subterranean society and return to report
surreal, nightmarish encounters in the vigorous and cynical language of
hardened adventurers."
Ready to join the adventures? Sure you are. Pick up Julián's book and feel the jolt ten times over.
Mexican author Julián Herbert, born 1971
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