This is easily the most disturbing story I've ever read. The narrators' straightforward and steady reporting of their increasingly monstrous experimentation with science and art add to the horror of it, they seem to feel no doubt or remorse in pursuit of their lofty and depraved projects. Within this story love is vulgar, bodies exist to be exploited, and the primal self is restrained under a thin guise of rational humanity.

Doctor Quintana and his colleagues believe their superiority to be expressed through their intelligence, through their professionalism, through their seemingly noble pursuit of what lies beyond death. Yet their work is dependent on their inhumanity, revealed ugly and unforgiving through their routinely ableist, racist and classist dismissal of their victims' rights as people. A hundred years later Doctor Quintana's legacy is ironically all but forgotten.

The remains of his ambition rest in his derelict comemadre plants and the metal frogs preserved for his second decapitation victim, then distributed as objects of comfort to those who followed. It's these frogs which distinctly unsettle his grandson Sebastian, and begin the boy's unraveling, which culminates in the novel when he becomes a willing sacrifice to his ex-lover's meticulously planned yet disconcerting work of art once again involving the inherited comemadre plant.

Fully immersive and disturbingly creative, Comemadre presents a ruthless world brimming with repetitive imagery and odd anxieties, which travel through a hundred years of history. I'd recommend this book to anyone looking to read a truly unique horror story, but please be wary of the subject matter and content warnings below.