Thousands of Eyes:A Novel

Mad Max meets JG Ballard in this daring, high-octane, surrealist body horror set against a post-apocalyptic Bolivia in thrall to a speed-worshiping cult

In 1970s Bolivia, a man and his young son are on the run from accolades of a velocity cult hellbent on using their Plymouth Road Runner to unleash a primordial entity known as The Dream. In 1990, a teenage metalhead, whose brother died while drag racing, experiences visions and body transformations after a beating. A hundred years later—after the emergence of The Dream—a girl embarks on a journey across a dystopian wasteland to carry out her father’s dying wish.

The mystery behind the cult’s beliefs and gory rituals unfold across these three time periods. As the world is transfigured into a living apocalypse that is punctuated by spark plugs hanging like fruit from trees, the boundaries that distinguish humanity from machines, natural landscapes from those of the mind, and the realm of the living from that of the dead, are diluted under the intoxicating effect of The Dream.

Fusing elements of horror, gothic, and speculative fiction, Thousands of Eyes balances its chilling and cruel propulsion with quieter moments of emotional intensity and lyricism to reveal the grotesque beauty of desolation. Maximiliano Barrientos is a wholly original and bold new voice in Latin American letters, available to English-language readers for the first time. | MAXIMILIANO BARRIENTOS lives and teaches in Bolivia. He has been widely published in Latin America. Thousands of Eyes is his English language debut.

THOMAS BUNSTEAD has translated some of the leading Spanish-language writers working today, including Marina Closs, Yuri Herrera, and Enrique Vila-Matas.