Bolaño's way of telling

Second-hand, even third-hand stories;

Multi-country setting;

Dialogues in plain paragraphs without quotation marks; occasionally you get lost in convos and can’t tell who’s saying what it doesn’t matter anyway.

Long paragraphs, sometimes only one paragraph from end-to-end. No pause for the lives described. It moves plots along and spins everything up on the pages.

On the other hand, being very verbose about the names of irrelevant people involved and the titles of their works - typical Bolano

This collection is particularly spooky, weird, and dark, not Bataille kind of dark - interesting to see them both tackling the topic of necrophilia though. It might be closer to Polanski dark but quieter, more poetic and inward.

Detectives, murderers, pornstars, not confined to poets this time he gives those characters a touch of the divine, which I liked.

My favorites are Prefiguration of Lalo Cura, Joanna Silvestri, Detectives, The return, Cell mates, Murdering whores. (can't believe he writes Joanna Silvestri at first! saw someone said "it might be too strong for a public shelf" lol)