In his new novel Where Minotaurs Graze (“Onde Pastam os Minotauros”), Terron relocates the myth of the Minotaur, that horrific, carnivorous hybrid of human body and bull’s head, deep in the Brazilian countryside. Somewhere in Mato Grosso, a huge slaughterhouse with its associated soya fields dominates a town as its sole employer. But the factory produces for export to Arab countries and the local employees have been replaced by Palestinian Muslims. The laid-off workers stand with other starving people outside the fence, waiting for the customary handout of leftover bones on the last working day of the year. But inside the slaughterhouse, two friends, Crente (engl.: Believer) and Cão (engl.: Dog), one of whom has just lost his wife to the pandemic and with it his faith, while the other is perhaps himself a hybrid creature, for he can hear the cattle speak, are planning an uprising. When a commission arrives late in the afternoon to investigate the possibility of kosher slaughter, the revolt breaks out. Cão, who planned it, is killed in the process, sacrificing himself to feed the hungry and free the cattle, but Crente and Cão’s girlfriend Lucy Fuerza, who in the meantime have blown open the company safe, manage to escape from the general destruction with the looted money.
With his powerful, empathetic and controlled pictorial language, Terron unfolds this apocalyptic story that exposes globalised capitalism as well as man’s ruthless treatment of the nature entrusted to him. At the end, despite everything, he hints at the hope that the path out of the labyrinth may lead to a more just world.

In his new novel The Laughter of Rats (“O Riso dos Ratos”), Terron creates a dystopian picture of Brazil’s present or near future. His nameless protagonist, an intellectual who works as a freelance translator and editor, lives in an equally nameless city. He is the father of an adult daughter, a student of acting who was raped by a bar owner. Not trusting the system of justice, the father feels obliged to seek revenge himself. A request that his daughter rejects in horror, as she believes it will set in motion an endless chain of violence. The daughter flees, the father sinks into lethargy, incapable of any action, and does not leave the apartment for months. When he is finally forced to, he enters a devastated city where – perhaps as a result of a deadly virus – all social norms have been suspended. The return to his apartment building is barred and suddenly he joins the ranks of the homeless. He finds refuge in the former Futurama supermarket, where he used to do his shopping with his daughter. But this is only the first stop in a cruel descent that leads him to the underworld, to the plantations of a dubious “bishop” and even as a prisoner to a slave ship. Like Dante in his Commedia, he traverses purgatory and hell to eventually find death on an apparently paradisiacal island. What keeps him alive is the thought of revenge, but also the memory of moments of happiness with his daughter.
Terron tells this apocalyptic journey through hell in a powerful, often lyrical language that will remain fixed in readers’ memories.

There are only fifty Kaajapukugi Indians left in the world. It is an isolated and mysterious tribe that, with the destruction of the Amazon, finds itself facing extinction because it has lost its land and means of living. It is about to disappear forever. In a daring scheme, it is up to the enigmatic Boaventura, a mixture of indigenous rights activist and adventurer, to lead the last of the kaajapukugi, as political refugees, to a sanctuary in Mexico. The idea provokes controversy, and the world watches attentively the rescue preparations. But Boaventura suddenly dies, and the person given the responsibility for concluding the plan is another activist with little knowledge of the tribe. He goes on to find himself in the midst of a macabre conspiracy and a mystery whose tentacles expand into both the past and the future. It is he who tells the story.
In the novel Death and Meteor (“A Morte e o Meteoro”), Joca Reiners Terron creates an intricate and surprising literary adventure that combines the end of the Amazon with ancestral secrets, anarchist Indians and hallucinogenic insects.

The Tremendous Sadness of the Snow Leopard (“A Tristeza Extraordinária do Leopardo-das-Neves”) intertwines the gripping stories of three main characters to form an intriguing whole. A man in his fifties looks after his senile father, not knowing he has a sick sister. A shifty nurse is taking care of a strange child that is only awake at night while a taxi driver lets his attack dogs loose to hunt for human prey. Then an innocent night excursion to the zoo to see the lonely snow leopard turns into a nightmare. As the mysterious child’s secret is unveiled, the man shows his sister the sun after 66 years of darkness.

Combining beautiful language with a touch of irony and magic realism, Joca Reiners Terron’s latest novel is full of eerie suspense.

From the Bottom of the Well You Can See the Moon (“Do Fundo do Poço se Vê a Lua”) is a fast-paced crime novel about identity and brotherly love, written in a style at once entertaining and violent.

Wilson and William are twins born in São Paulo in the 1980s but their similarities are merely physical. After a tragic accident, Wilson loses his memory and starts a new life in Cairo. But the past keeps nagging at his subconscious, and as the pieces start falling into place, he lures his long-lost brother to Egypt to confront him with what he now knows really happened that night…