Alicia is in the Basement

by Santiago Eximeno

One summer afternoon, Santi and Maria's daughter disappears from a public park without a trace.

After months of agony and fruitless investigation that only serves to tear his life even further apart, Santi learns of a being that unleashes an entirely new kind of horror on the young family's life:

"He Who Does Not Speak With Children."

Genres: Horror

120 pages, Paperback

Published March 24, 2026

About the author

Santiago Eximeno escribe sobre la futilidad de la existencia, sobre la irrelevancia, sobre la lucha de clases, sobre lo social y lo emotivo, todo pasado por el tamiz de lo grotesco, de lo terrible, de lo fantástico. Su obra rezuma sentido de la maravilla y demencia a partes iguales. Ha publicado novelas, libros de relatos, libros de ficción mínima y numerosos relatos y microrrelatos en diferentes antologías y revistas. Ha diseñado juegos de mesa, juegos de rol y ficciones interactivas. Y como siempre le recuerda su madre, su segundo apellido es Hernampérez.

Reviews

[Lori · Rating 5 out of 5]

Throwing all the stars at this one... it’s easily going to rank as one of my favorites of the year. Tenebrous Press went for broke here and this is by far their best!

Alicia Is in the Basement is the painstaking, demented journey of a man who loses his daughter in a public park one afternoon. It’s a dark, terrifying glimpse into what it means when a child goes missing and how far a parent might go to bring her back home.

Already trapped in a fractured marriage, with another child on the way, the disappearance shatters Santi and Maria. Maria needs to move forward. Santi cannot. Will not. After months of realizing the police will never find her, Santi begins his own investigation. What he uncovers is a chilling pattern of missing children and a trail that leads to a mysterious, awful entity known only as He Who Does Not Speak With Children.

The final pages will leave you staring into the abyss, where hope and horror blur together in the most devastating way.

For fans of Ben Tanzer's The Missing and Nicholas Cage's Pay the Ghost.

[Cris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you to Tenebrous Press for the gifted ARC.
Out May 19.

Just finished this one and I’m still sitting with it.
It’s short, but I didn’t want to pause once I started. I kept thinking maybe something would shift. Maybe the father was onto something. Maybe this was heading somewhere different. You almost let yourself believe that for a second.
The story follows a father after his daughter goes missing at a park. After that, everything feels smaller. His thoughts keep looping. His life narrows. His marriage starts to feel strained without the book having to point at it. It’s just there.
The atmosphere is thick with sadness. It hangs over everything. Even the quiet parts feel heavy.
There are dark moments. There are parts where things don’t feel totally grounded. But that wasn’t the part that got to me. It was how normal it all felt. How believable the grief was. How far someone might go when they don’t know what to do with that kind of loss.
I really loved this one and hope to read morw of Eximel’s work!

[Leo Otherland · Rating 5 out of 5]

Special thanks to Tenebrous Press for the ARC copy they provided.

Tenebrous always serves the odd and the unusual, dare I say it, the weird, and Alicia is in the Basement is a serving like no other, a top tier terror that is all the more terrifying because for a while you can almost convince yourself the main character is getting better. That he’s actually on to something and might make a difference. Might change the terror, capture the horror that’s been creeping up on families for centuries.

And then… you are forced to remember that you’re reading a horror novel and there are no happy endings here.

Alicia is in the Basement is heartbreaking above all else, however. Love, and the depths of loss, are its center, and you will question just how far you’d go for someone you love. For the one you love most of all. The one who did not deserve to be lost, but can never come back.

The fact this book is so very human at its core is probably its most horrifying aspect. Yes, there are monsters. Yes, there is the familiar twist of insanity vs the paranormal. And yet… at the center is just this: Our human capacity for love. And how deeply we break when that sustaining love is taken from us.

In absence of love, we become monsters.

If I have taken anything from this book, I think this is it.

Alicia is in the Basement is not an easy book to read, and I think Tenebrous is spot on with including content warnings in the publication, but if you can come to this book, if you can brave the horror that is our human experience, I don’t think you’ll regret it.

Risk staring into the darkness. You just might see some of yourself staring back.

[Kim Layman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book will challenge your sense of truth and reality.

This slower burn horror story starts out as stated above-with the disappearance of Alicia. Our MC, Santi, is wracked with guilt over the situation, and cannot move on until he finds her. And what starts out as a parent’s desperate love for their child turns into an obsession that alienates himself from he knows and loves.

The author slowly unravels Santi’s mind-piece by piece-until you do not know if he is crazy or not. Santi gravitates and clings onto the clue that his daughter may be with “He Who Does Not Speak To Children”. Who is he? We don’t know. But he's there, in the shadows, at the edge of your periphery, daring you to spot him. Or is he? And there lies the madness and grip of this story-what’s real and what isn’t? And as you get closer to the end, you’re no closer to the truth, until suddenly anything is possible. And Santi? He becomes what makes your heart break.

I quite liked this novella. It’s not gory, fast paced, or bring heart-pounding terror. But he does wrap us in lingering dread, and leaves the reader unsettled.

A big thank you to Tenebrous Press for my arc. My opinion is my own.

[Mikky · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mini review: 3.5 rounded to 4.

This one kept me interested, and I was intrigued by the twists, I just don't think it was quite for me.

While I am a big fan of a, "wait, wtf happened" story and ending, this felt like it needed more than a novella to really accomplish that successfully. I'd love to see this fleshed out to 200 pages with more character exploration and lore.

I did not like the main character, and maybe that was on purpose, but it was hard to root for him when he was just so unlikeable from the start.

I would give this author another go, for sure. This book had a very weighty, foreboding atmosphere that I appreciated.

This one releases May 19, 2026 if you wanna check it out!

Thanks to Tenebrous Press for the ARC in exchange for an honest review!

TW: child abduction, child death, alcoholism.

[Jacy Morris · Rating 4 out of 5]

A powerful book, a nice descent into madness. The main character's perspective is fascinating, heartbreaking, and transforms into a train wreck you can't look away from. Some people will love the ending, some people won't. I fell more toward the latter, but the ride up that ending kept me turning the pages with some great language and some nice twists.

[Emma E. Murray · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heartbreaking and painful, I couldn't bring myself to put it down and read it all in one sitting. Definitely a top read of the year for me.

[The Blog Without a Face · Rating 4 out of 5]

126 Pages that Will Make You Want to Lie Face-down on the Floor
BWAF SINISTER SELECTION
BWAF Score: 8/10

TL;DR: Alicia is in the Basement is a 126-page sucker punch disguised as a parental grief story. Santiago Eximeno builds domestic realism so convincing you forget you’re reading horror, then pulls the floor out and drops you into something ancient and awful. One of the most emotionally devastating novellas in recent memory. It earns every goddamn thing it does.

The Crocs come up early. Black, pink, matching. A family discount if every member of the family bought a pair. The narrator’s are the black ones; his daughter chose them. He is wearing them at the park on the afternoon she disappears, and he will be sweating into them later, in the police station, while a woman with an iPad asks questions about his marriage.

The Crocs are how Santiago Eximeno‘s novella (originally Alicia en el sótano, Libros.com, 2015; translated from the Spanish by Alicia L. Alonso for Tenebrous Press) does most of its work. The brand names accumulate: Lidl, FNAC, Hello Kitty, Lighting McQueen, Sennheiser, Samsonite, Pokémon, Invizimals trading cards. Tonopan for the migraines. Fairy washing-up liquid because his mother always insisted on Fairy. This is all the mechanism by which the daughter’s absence enters the prose. The named real thing in the wrong context, accumulating, repeated until the catalogue itself is the bereavement. A father missing his daughter looks at a yellow slide and remembers a discount.

The premise is what it sounds like. Six-year-old Alicia goes missing from a Madrid park while her parents are arguing on a bench. Her mother is twenty weeks pregnant. The father, Santi, drinks too much, works in IT, is the kind of man who calls his own grief weight an “emphatic pregnancy.” A five-year-old friend of Alicia’s knows part of what happened. An old woman at the park entrance knows more. There is, somewhere, an old man who does not speak with children. He takes them. He has been taking them.

What follows is a descent and Eximeno commits to it without flinching. Part One is the disappearance, Part Two is the search, Part Three is the encounter, and the proportions are exact. The first half is almost entirely domestic. The wife begins to bleed. The mother-in-law says it would not have happened if Alicia had been baptized. The narrator’s boss tells him to take the week off (“we’ll make do without you. No one here is indispensable, you know”) and he wonders, in real time, whether his boss is just thoughtless or the biggest son of a bitch he has ever known. The horror is in routine. The horror is in the catalogue of who you have to tell. The phone calls to make. The cashier at the supermarket. The baker.

The voice’s most ambitious move arrives after Santi has lost the house. He is staying in a friend’s apartment by then, and the prose splits in two. The main line continues to insist that Santi is at home, that the books on the shelves are Alicia’s books, that the kitchen is his kitchen. Italicized parentheticals, lowered slightly, contradict him. (not your kitchen.) (not your house, not your house, not your house.) The italics are the part of the narrator that knows. The unitalicized line is the part that has decided not to. The technique is unsubtle and it is the right kind of unsubtle. Eximeno is not asking the reader to decode anything. He is asking the reader to sit inside a head that is rejecting its own information in real time, and the parenthetical voice is the rejected information waiting to be heard. The book is at its strongest in this register, and the register is the book’s actual subject.

A briefer chapter pivots the novella sideways into 1885 Munich. A grandmother arrives by train at a Leichenhaus, the kind of nineteenth-century mortuary where corpses were watched for days before burial in case they woke up, threaded to a central bell that would ring at any movement. Hufeland’s Scheintod, the suspended state between life and death. Her grandson is gone from the cold room. The director suggests, of course, that the boy must have walked out on his own. This sequence is the book’s quiet showpiece. It folds a real medical anxiety, premature-burial paranoia, the threadwork bells of nineteenth-century Bavaria, into a supernatural one without strain. It does not explain what it is doing. It does not have to.

What the book gets right, it gets right in images that are difficult to set down. Sand running from a child’s mouth. A swing chain. A blank, wide-open look at the sky. A fountain in the park that has never worked. The bone-white staircase that emerges from the side of a road and overlaps reality “like a badly Photoshopped image.” The phrase is a small joke and it lands. The image stays. Some books generate dread by what they imply; this one generates dread by what it sees, in plain light, and refuses to soften.

Eximeno’s larger fictional project includes a place called Umbría, the surreal underground city he has been writing toward for over a decade. The 2013 collection Umbría won Spain’s Premio Nocte; he has been awarded the Premio Ignotus four times and is a member of the Horror Writers Association, with work translated into Japanese, Korean, French, and Bulgarian. Alicia is in the Basement is the household-level entry into that geography. The basement opens off a Madrid park where children eat sand and parents stare at their phones. The mythology is the lived domestic detail. The lived domestic detail is the mythology. That this fusion should hold across an entire book and not collapse on either side, into pure realism or pure mythos, is the achievement.

The nitpicks. The translation is mostly transparent and occasionally stiff; a few sentences register as Spanish-shaped English. The narrator’s recurring self-flagellation (idiot, asshole, ostrich, fat man in shorts) sometimes lands as a tic rather than a tell, although the line between the two is exactly where Eximeno wants the reader. And the supernatural figure in the third act gets a long monologue that briefly tilts toward the operetta register the rest of the book has avoided, complete with phrases like “Mr. I-don’t-know-your-name-and-I-don’t-care.” It is brief. It is recovered from. The descent reasserts.

Tenebrous Press has put the book in good company. Jenna Cha (The Sickness and Black Stars Above) supplies the cover and interior illustrations, which arrive at the right intervals and stay out of the prose’s way. Alex Woodroe edits. The imprint has been steadily building a catalogue of New Weird translations and originals, and Alicia is in the Basement is the kind of acquisition that makes the catalogue look smarter retroactively.

What kind of father would do this? The book asks the question. It does not, in any clean sense, answer.

[Books For Decaying Millennials · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks to Tenebrous Press, for providing me with an early review copy.
All thoughts and opinions are my own.
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One of the things we are forced to reckon with, as we age and become aware of the world, is the reality of the terrible things that go on. These ugly deeds, have a current, have a pulse. Coming face to face with the reality of it all, is a heavy task, it crushes hearts, ruins lives. Some dig their heals in, acknowledging the darkness, and raging against it. I maintain that the the bulk of the Horror Fiction Community, is in this camp. Full of Warmth, pain and compassion... For others, it becomes the tipping point. The opening of that door, that peek into those shadowed corners of life, tears them asunder. They are un-made.
"Alicia is in the Basement" is a reminder of that abyssal essence that flows in the world. We do what we can, to ignore it, but it resides in us all. A disparate thing, that attains physical manifestation.
You don't read Santiago's book, as much as you find yourself trapped in a box. Forced along, through a waking nightmare. It's a fever dream that throws the facts of reality and the flow of time askew. When that great ugliness, and loss becomes your world, you will be changed.
Santiago Eximeno's novella is a heartbreaking, Stygian meditation on the cruelties of reality, loss, and the violence done to the innocent. It's a book that some part of you will plead for you not to read, not to finish, but like the narrator, you'll find yourself reading on, pushing forward, moving downwards.

[Phillip Keeling · Rating 4 out of 5]

Someone once pointed out that most men are all too quick to beat their chests and declare that they'd take a bullet to save their kids. They'd fight a bear to protect their family. But when it comes to banal, actual day-to-day stuff that is much more likely to have an effect (ie, regular health checkups, therapy, shedding toxic traits) they can't be bothered.

This is what was going through my head as I read Alicia is in the Basement, a weird tale of loss, generational trauma, conspiracy, and public playgrounds.

After his daughter goes missing, our protagonist falls down an alcohol-fueled rabbit hole of urban legends and paranoid theories. Deluded by grief, he ignores the family that he still has (a wife and baby daughter) and spreads the trauma to innocent outsiders like an infectious disease. And we get to watch every incremental shift as his sanity slips.

It hurts to watch. This is a painful, unflinching book. Eximeno's prose (deftly translated to English by Alicia L. Alonso) treads carefully one moment, and then explodes like a shotgun the next. It is a very good book.

It just hurts.