When one has made a perfect book (especially in a genre as difficult, stereotyped and apparently with rules as marked as they are in black, even if you can skip them or give new and original approaches), has had a great reception by the critics and by the reading public, and wants to continue writing within the same genre (or even in another) is inevitable to feel a pressure and a fear of not knowing how to maintain the level.
If in the first novel of La Gomara you breathed, I already commented, realistic fear of poverty, when we see ourselves evicted, in the street, begging for alms; here we have another type of poverty. Not to lose everything, but to lose enough, the little we have, to achieve our dream of a better life, to start a business or to improve our situation in some way; to lose enough to destabilize a whole life that we thought was well managed despite having a weak base.
Eva is a thief. A pickpocket who steals both in the subway, on the street or in tourist flats where she knows she can get a cut.
"I only do it on public transport in case of need or if I can't contain the impulse, like this morning. And when I do, I prefer Friday and Saturday afternoons, with the trains overflowing with small groups that have gone shopping. Even in the early hours of the morning, when the fifties get close to me and almost give me the wallet that comes out of the back pocket of my trousers".
In Come badly given the protagonist, an anti-fatal woman began sunk in misery and by a blow of fate at the end of the story saw his life if not arranged, in a better situation than at the beginning. In the blood, it is just the opposite. The protagonist's more or less unburdened situation goes to waste when the jeweler she usually goes to blackmail her into doing a job for him. In addition, due to the circumstances of the plot, Eva is forced to return to live in her parents' house and will even go back to an old boyfriend/lover/partner, Oleg, which is not exactly clean wheat either.
However, unlike Ruth Santana, Eva is a fatal woman. She is not one of the types, and that is an asset in favor of the author, but she is a master of her decisions, successes, and mistakes, whom we see moving, getting wet, working, staining her hands. And it is also the voice that will tell us the story(s) of her and Oleg.
Gomara relates in a natural and realistic way the return to home and the problems of Eva's coexistence with her parents, emphasizing the conflicts that arise and that seem to happen again with a mother who still treats her as if she were a child and whom our protagonist accuses of having stolen her childhood.
-Let's go for a couple of days,- he says.
-Where to?
-Far away.
-Just a couple of days?
-No, forever.
-Are you serious?
-No.
These are times when friendship is governed by messages in Whatsapp groups, posture and photos in Instagram and other mentions in social networks, where people continue to worry about appearing to be doing well, where social classes continue to fight each other without knowing it and where everyone has to take the chestnuts out of the fire, especially if you have to live with a deadly disease.
And to all this must be added the mafia plot of Oleg...
The blood is read with enthusiasm, the characters are so well profiled that you can imagine them perfectly, you understand their dilemmas, their problems and, best of all is that you do not know if you like them or not. Because in the end, the protagonist couple is a couple of bastards that you prefer not to have to cross in their "working" life, but you put on their skin, and the author knows how to make you dress them, and be able to understand them. That has a lot of merits, and, to top it off, the story is well-plotted from beginning to end, best told and finalized.
You have to be very good and have a lot of class to know how to mix all this well and that you do not get a cocktail too watered or too strong and Gomara has shown to know how to choose the ingredients and quantities for the result is perfect.
It is noted that Gomara has sucked the noir since it has use of reason and this second novel is proof that the previous one was not the result of the luck of the beginner. But, above all, it is noticeable that he unwraps himself with ease and that he is impatient to regurgitate his baggage by releasing on the paper everything his head wants to give birth.
En la Sangre is not just another black novel. It is the black novel that has just defined the style and voice of an author who promises to give us many more literary joys. An original novel, fresh, casual but at the same time respectful with the classics. A past whore. The work of an author for whom, if the world were a fair place, publishers should be offering blind contracts for a third book.