La oscura memoria: cine negro y brechas fantásticas en Enterrar a los muertos (2005) y Las serpientes ciegas (2008) [Una contraposición]

Memory literature is a pillar of recent Spanish prose fiction. This article takes aim at one of its more unexplored areas (Stalinist purges in Spain during the Civil War) through the analysis and comparison of two well-known and heterodox works: the novel Enterrar a los muertos, by Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, and the comic Las serpientes ciegas, by Felipe Hernández Cava and Bartolomé Seguí. The connection between both texts is the film noir aesthetic which permeates the comic and which —as we intend to show— structures the tension in the novel. The end of the journey is the use that Cava and Seguí make of the fantastic, whose consequences are studied in detail in the following pages. There are not many compositions which have managed to break away from the realism prevalent in this kind of literature.