The Eye of Goliath

A dark, propulsive literary gothic novel that puts a modern twist on Stevenson and Poe, from a thrilling new voice in Latin American horror.

“Impossible to stop reading. It has all the fascinating tension of great literature.”  — Mariana Enríquez, author of Our Share of Night

In this deliriously inventive twist on The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Argentine powerhouse Diego Muzzio conjures a haunting story of shattering war trauma and the disturbing proximity of sanity and madness in his English-language debut.

In 1920s Edinburgh, war veteran Dr. Edward Pierce develops experimental therapies to treat mentally ill patients whose cases have been rejected by conventional psychiatry. One night, he receives a visitor who asks him to take on an unusual new patient: David Bradley, an engineer who was sent to inspect the conditions of a lighthouse on a remote island in southern Argentina. The sojourn was a disaster, and he returned completely mute, his body overwhelmed by a single compulsion: to swim and swim, in any environment, to the point of total exhaustion.

Bradley’s fragmentary diary reveals how this rational, disciplined man became the deranged individual brought to the sanatorium. Full of bizarre details and echoes of macabre events, it guides Pierce in his studies of his patients, propelling him into scientific terrain that grows increasingly grotesque.

With an ingenious structure that creates doubling and uncertainty at every turn, The Eye of Goliath is a masterfully tense novel that unites classic gothic atmospheres with disturbingly modern psychological horror.Diego Muzzio was born in Buenos Aires and currently lives in France. An author of poetry and fiction for children and adults, he has won several literary awards, including the Premio Hispanoamericano de Poesía Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the 2023 Fundación Medifé Filba Award. The Eye of Goliath is his first novel.

Rahul Bery translates from Spanish & Portuguese to English, and is based in Cardiff. He has translated books by David Trueba, Simone Campos and Michel Nieva and his translations have also appeared in Granta, the TLS, the Stinging Fly, Words Without Borders, Freeman's and elsewhere.