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We're programmed as a species to understand everything as polar opposites: life and death, war and peace, love and hate, being and nothingness, it's a weird quirk that humans have that make them think they understand everything there is to existence. The truth is probably much more complicated than what out narrow cognitive tools can gather and that's why we have literature to enhance our perception. Magic realism is an interesting genre because it can be really bad or really good. Bad magic realism can really be some hippie bullshit about childhood, but great magic realism, like Rios de la Luz's short story collection THE PULSE BETWEEN DIMENSIONS AND THE DESERT can make you appreciate the complexity of existence in all its mysterious majesty.
The driving idea behind the short stories of Rios de la Luz is that everything that ever was created is real: everything that's been written, dreamed, imagined, everything has a life of its own. For example, one of her most subtle stories is titled Hammer and stars a little girl having to write a fiction about a hammerhead shark for a homework. The subtle alchemy of this story is beautiful: the little girls gets the homework assignment, stresses out about it, dreams of the hammerhead shark, writes it down and triggers a powerful relationship to writing. Hammer was very moving in its simplicity. Sometimes magic doesn't require any flare of fireworks. Sometimes, transformation happens within.
Other stories are quite more visual and phantasmagorical than Hammer, though. The first story Martian Matters for example is an elaborate construction meant to celebrate the borderless imagination of a young mind. There are a handful of very short flash stories in THE PULSE BETWEEN DIMENSIONS AND THE DESERT, which are more abstract and evocative, the way prose poetry can be. These stories didn't work as well for me, but they did display Rios de la Luz's impressive control over language and the power of her artistic vision.
THE PULSE BETWEEN DIMENSIONS AND THE DESERT is kind of over before it started, but it shows a lot of promise from an authors with a really cool creative philosophy. The possibilities are limitless when your stories understand the mysteries of the human heart so well, but don't limit themselves to the realm of physical perception. Great magic realism is about the world that lies beyond what you eyes and see and THE PULSE BETWEEN DIMENSIONS AND THE DESERT is just that. It is a satisfying and engaging read that challenges the conventional way we've been writing and reading stories. I can't help feeling that I might not have appreciated this book for the right reasons, but I had quite a good time with it.
