Vast Hell

“A small town is a vast hell”

The quote above describes how badly some people perceive small towns. There could be many reasons behind this strong dislike. One of them could be that small towns are often seen as these tight and small communities where everybody know each other in one way or another and are noisy with too much time on their hands, which resolves in gossip spreading out quickly in town when something happens. But what do you do when you try to move past the gossip, and stumble upon the ugly truth?

We see this in the novel “Vast Hell” by author Guillermo Martinez, where the quote is also from. The story takes place in a small village, and resolves around a man that thinks back to the arrival of a nameless young boy in the small-town, that manages to become the talk of town, when rumour starts spreading that he is romantically involved with the wife of one of the two barbers in town, who people call “the French Woman” for unknown reasons. Fuel is added to the fire when the boy and the French Woman disappear, leading half the town to believe they ran off together and the other half to believe that the barber somehow did away with them. Further investigation into the case gives the story a whole different turn, because after digging in the ground to see if the barber had buried them there, they do find dead bodies, but not the bodies of the boy and the French woman, but of a lot of unknown people.

The story is told with a first person narrator, which is this man working in a grocery stop, who seems to be a very common and simple citizen in the small town, with no personal relationship to the boy, the barber or the French woman. This makes us as a reader see the drama the way in a very subjective way, and how the rest of the town generally sees it. From afar and without any real insight on what really has happened between the barber,