Fiction
La hermandad de la Casa Grande (The brotherhood of the Big House)
Una novela negra sobre el juicio del Estado a los brujos de Chiloé (A detective novel about the state's trial of the witches of Chiloé)
by Eduardo Pérez Arroyo
It's 1879. To the north, Chile defends foreign investment in the Pacific War. To the south, beyond the already invaded Araucania, from a large, almost unexplored island, rumors of violence, superstition and a state incapable of enforcing its law spread. The elite would be at ease if some “elements” that are not occupied at the border with Peru penetrated Chiloé. They need evidence to condemn those criminals who terrorize the population with old indigenous beliefs. They call themselves witches. They are organized as La Recta Provincia or La Hermandad de la Casa Grande. They lie to scare and change the names of the cities on the island –Achao, Dalcahue or Quicaví–, confusing them with others: Buenos Aires, Villarrica, Salamanca. If they were only myths, it would be enough for the government to forget that secret place. But the one who calls himself the Greatest Liar in the World claims to have escaped the sorcerers and travels the north glimpsing the aliens: he talks to them of malice, monsters and murders; of the bloody clans' struggles to become a decaying reign. For these lies, or to secure an unstable national pride, coronels and tenants decide to put an end to things that a mortal has no power to finish.
