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Alicia en el sótano
Alicia, una niña de seis años, desaparece una tarde en el parque mientras sus padres discuten. Todos la han visto, pero nadie sabe dónde ha ido. Los padres, tras una búsqueda infructuosa por parte de la Policía, tratarán de rehacer sus vidas. Pero el sentimiento de culpa que consume al padre le llevará a tratar de localizarla a cambio de cualquier cosa, incluso de su propia vida.
En su búsqueda desesperada hallará un patrón, una relación inesperada entre las desapariciones de los niños y los accidentes que sufren en los parques. Y ese patrón le conducirá hasta un anciano, Aquel que viene a por los niños, la clave para descubrir qué le ha ocurrido a su hija y dónde se encuentra.
Alicia en el sótano es una historia sobre la pérdida, un libro que habla de lo más terrible que le puede ocurrir a unos padres, perder a un hijo.
En su búsqueda desesperada hallará un patrón, una relación inesperada entre las desapariciones de los niños y los accidentes que sufren en los parques. Y ese patrón le conducirá hasta un anciano, Aquel que viene a por los niños, la clave para descubrir qué le ha ocurrido a su hija y dónde se encuentra.
Alicia en el sótano es una historia sobre la pérdida, un libro que habla de lo más terrible que le puede ocurrir a unos padres, perder a un hijo.
Paperback
First published January 1, 2015
About the author
Santiago Eximeno
145 books176 followersSantiago 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.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
November 23, 2025
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.
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.
May 17, 2026
Alicia is in the Basement is a bleak, deeply unsettling novella that transforms the horror of a missing child into something of malice. What begins as every parents worst nightmare gradually descends into a suffocating, psychological and supernatural spiral, where grief erodes the boundaries between obsession and desperation. Eximeno examines Santi's unraveling with painful intimacy. The story is not driven by twists so much as emotional deterioration. Every lead, or lack thereof, and every unanswered question pushes him further toward the incomprehensible. The presence of "He Who Does Not Speak To Children" adds a layer of eerie folkloric dimension, but the true terror lies in the utter devastation surrounding Alicia's disappearance. Eximeno displays how loss can consume a person entirely, reshaping their new reality into something unbearable. Despite its short length, Alicia is in the Basement leaves a heavy impression. Eximeno writes with a razor sharp precision, creating an atmosphere of thick dread that never loosens its grip. The end is haunting in the truest sense, devastating and impossible to shake. Thank you Tenebrous Press for sending me a review copy. Translated from Spanish, this novella drops June 16th, 2026 so don't miss it!
January 4, 2017
En realidad un 3,5 o un 3 o un 3,75... no lo sé.
Alicia en el sótano se lee de una sentada. Es corto y engancha: eso del ritmo a Santi siempre se le ha dado bien. También se le da bien esa prosa sencilla, en apariencia simple, que es la marca definitiva de un trabajo intenso de edición. Una prosa que NO te saca del sueño de ficción, que fluye con facilidad, siempre es una prosa buena.
Tengo dos problemas personales con este libro, lo que le baja la nota en mi perspectiva "goodreadiana" absolutamente subjetiva.
-Primero: Conozco al autor y conozco a su mujer. Esto hace que hubiera momentos muy espeluznantes al leer los nombres de los protagonistas y tenerlos, a ellos, físicamente ante mis ojos. Brrr.
Por otro lado, bien por Santi para enfrentarse de manera tan directa a demonios tan personales. Imagino que personas que no lo conozcan experimentarán la lectura de otro modo.
-Segundo: ¿Alguna vez os ha pasado eso de que tienes el final perfecto ya montado en tu cabeza y el autor no cumple con ese final que esperabas? No doy más datos para no hacer spoilers, pero creo que el final de este libro tendrá más sentido para personas que conozcan un poco más del universo literario del autor. Personalmente habría huido del componente fantástico, o habría creado mayores elementos de anticipación para que este cobrase mayor coherencia.
Tengo que hacer mención a la excelente labor de Libros.com. El libro da gusto leerlo. Aparte de alguna mayúscula que se ha colado en incisos de diálogo con verbos de lengua, tanto la edición física como literaria son más que agradables.
Alicia en el sótano se lee de una sentada. Es corto y engancha: eso del ritmo a Santi siempre se le ha dado bien. También se le da bien esa prosa sencilla, en apariencia simple, que es la marca definitiva de un trabajo intenso de edición. Una prosa que NO te saca del sueño de ficción, que fluye con facilidad, siempre es una prosa buena.
Tengo dos problemas personales con este libro, lo que le baja la nota en mi perspectiva "goodreadiana" absolutamente subjetiva.
-Primero: Conozco al autor y conozco a su mujer. Esto hace que hubiera momentos muy espeluznantes al leer los nombres de los protagonistas y tenerlos, a ellos, físicamente ante mis ojos. Brrr.
Por otro lado, bien por Santi para enfrentarse de manera tan directa a demonios tan personales. Imagino que personas que no lo conozcan experimentarán la lectura de otro modo.
-Segundo: ¿Alguna vez os ha pasado eso de que tienes el final perfecto ya montado en tu cabeza y el autor no cumple con ese final que esperabas? No doy más datos para no hacer spoilers, pero creo que el final de este libro tendrá más sentido para personas que conozcan un poco más del universo literario del autor. Personalmente habría huido del componente fantástico, o habría creado mayores elementos de anticipación para que este cobrase mayor coherencia.
Tengo que hacer mención a la excelente labor de Libros.com. El libro da gusto leerlo. Aparte de alguna mayúscula que se ha colado en incisos de diálogo con verbos de lengua, tanto la edición física como literaria son más que agradables.
May 16, 2026
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.
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.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
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!
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!
June 5, 2026
What an absolute sucker punch to the gut! 🥺
June 12, 2026
Disclaimer: I received an ebook-copy from the publisher.
Alicia is a six-year-old girl who disappears from a park, while her parents, her mother pregnant and dissatisfied, her father overworked and drinking too much, are quarreling on a bench. A boy says he saw her fall down in the sand, her eyes wide open. An old woman says He Who Does Not Talk To Children has taken her. The police say there’s no trace of her anywhere and as the hours, days, weeks tick down, hope fades. The mother and father drift apart, lost in their own grief until the father starts to hunt down the man Who Does Not Talk To Children. He might get her back or he might get revenge. But at least he’ll get something. He’s lost everything else after all.
The book is slow, building up the domestic, featuring a not perfect, but functional family, which crumbles like a house of cards during the desperate rush of the initial search and the grind of waiting for results in the first part. The second part follows the father’s descent into grief and an ever increasing disconnect to his former life and it was my favorite part. The story is not subtle as the perspective of the father grows increasingly more warped, but it was both terrifying and understandable to follow him down this path and worked well. The third and final part shifts the story again, bringing it to a well-deserved ending.
The story explores grief in incredible ways. It plays with time and reality, reveling in the way grief displaces you and leaves you unmoored, days first rushing by in a flurry of adrenaline-fueled action, before slowing in the grief-numb daily survival. While the story felt a bit slow for me, because of that, it worked in the context of the story and helped to flesh out the father a lot more and make his actions understandable.
While I have never read the original work, I liked his new translation. I enjoyed the writing style and while I cannot say I enjoyed my time in the father’s mind, I also liked his narrative voice and the many small moments where his own self-image clashed with the tragic reality of his situation. I also really enjoyed the way the mythology was woven into the story.
If you’re looking for a new grief-fueled read that dives deep into the psyche of its main character and slowly but unflinchingly leads you (and the character) down an increasingly dark path, you will enjoy Alicia is in the Basement.
TW: alcoholism, gore, fatphobia, unreality, violence, violence against children (abduction, death, endangerment and murder)
Alicia is a six-year-old girl who disappears from a park, while her parents, her mother pregnant and dissatisfied, her father overworked and drinking too much, are quarreling on a bench. A boy says he saw her fall down in the sand, her eyes wide open. An old woman says He Who Does Not Talk To Children has taken her. The police say there’s no trace of her anywhere and as the hours, days, weeks tick down, hope fades. The mother and father drift apart, lost in their own grief until the father starts to hunt down the man Who Does Not Talk To Children. He might get her back or he might get revenge. But at least he’ll get something. He’s lost everything else after all.
The book is slow, building up the domestic, featuring a not perfect, but functional family, which crumbles like a house of cards during the desperate rush of the initial search and the grind of waiting for results in the first part. The second part follows the father’s descent into grief and an ever increasing disconnect to his former life and it was my favorite part. The story is not subtle as the perspective of the father grows increasingly more warped, but it was both terrifying and understandable to follow him down this path and worked well. The third and final part shifts the story again, bringing it to a well-deserved ending.
The story explores grief in incredible ways. It plays with time and reality, reveling in the way grief displaces you and leaves you unmoored, days first rushing by in a flurry of adrenaline-fueled action, before slowing in the grief-numb daily survival. While the story felt a bit slow for me, because of that, it worked in the context of the story and helped to flesh out the father a lot more and make his actions understandable.
While I have never read the original work, I liked his new translation. I enjoyed the writing style and while I cannot say I enjoyed my time in the father’s mind, I also liked his narrative voice and the many small moments where his own self-image clashed with the tragic reality of his situation. I also really enjoyed the way the mythology was woven into the story.
If you’re looking for a new grief-fueled read that dives deep into the psyche of its main character and slowly but unflinchingly leads you (and the character) down an increasingly dark path, you will enjoy Alicia is in the Basement.
TW: alcoholism, gore, fatphobia, unreality, violence, violence against children (abduction, death, endangerment and murder)
July 6, 2026
This story wasn't particularly bad, but the prose felt kinda off. Idk if it was the translation or that's just how the source material came lol. I did enjoy watching this guy get progressively crazier, although truth be told, he was already pretty nuts even before going through any trauma. Here's a bit of him in one of the earliest chapters when arguing with his wife: "I feel an impulse to punch her mouth shut--but I don't. I would never hurt her, even though sometimes I want to." looool what you want, a cookie?
June 6, 2026
a book that starts as a deeply harrowing, tragic tale about a father’s grief that spirals into a fever dream, is-this-actually-happening-or-is-it-not nightmare. this book is INTENSE. a powerful exploration of grief and the limits of our sanity, and yes, even what love makes us capable of. it’s only 97 pages long but felt much longer, in a great way, there is so much emotion and imagery embedded into each page. easily readable in one sitting if you’ve got the time for it.
definitely check trigger warnings as the plot contains some highly sensitive material, this is not for everyone.
definitely check trigger warnings as the plot contains some highly sensitive material, this is not for everyone.
June 18, 2026
A page turner with absolutely miserable vibes (complimentary).
January 19, 2026
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.
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.
March 29, 2026
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.
December 9, 2025
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.
April 30, 2026
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.
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.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
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.
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.
June 20, 2026
Man this book is grim. Exemino gets right to the point and doesn’t waste any real estate.
I don’t want to generalize, but I’ve found that I really enjoy works translated from Spanish. There’s a certain lack of fluff that I appreciate. This is a lean book. And it’s devastating and horrific and I love it
I don’t want to generalize, but I’ve found that I really enjoy works translated from Spanish. There’s a certain lack of fluff that I appreciate. This is a lean book. And it’s devastating and horrific and I love it
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Thanks to Tenebrous Press, for providing me with an early review copy.
All thoughts and opinions are my own.
-
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.
All thoughts and opinions are my own.
-
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.
February 2, 2016
Esta ha sido una lectura corta y dura, teniendo hijos sumergirte en una historia sobre la desaparición de una niña de un parque cualquiera (podría ser el tuyo, o el mío) es bastante difícil. Eximeno es un escritor que sabe como hacerme sentir incómoda (tengo los relatos de Bebés jugando con cuchillos), y esta historia no es la excepción, es una experiencia horrorosa que lleva a los padres de la tristeza a la locura, a la miseria sobre todo moral. Me gusto que hubiera un toque sobrenatural, casi es un alivio porque la realidad es mucho mas cruda.
July 2, 2026
this was a very quick read and honestly, it was quite gripping and kept me hooked. however, i think it needed to be longer to fully achieve the author’s intended effect, especially with that final twist. unfortunately, i did see it coming but it was still cool. i just wasn’t as emotionally moved as i thought i would be.
June 17, 2026
There is something about “child gone missing” stories from the parents’ perspective that elicits a truly primordial, instinctive reaction of utter horror, whether or not you have children yourself, though I imagine they take on a unique flavour of hell if you do. But it’s the job of transgressive horror, that sub-genre that, like a literary equivalent of the SAS, goes where few dare, to push beyond that pain barrier and see what happens on the other side. And boy does Alicia is in the Basement push. It pushes so hard that it is genuinely difficult to read at points, but, as in truly great novels that wade into these murky waters, it utilises lyrical prose and surreal imagery to impose a converse sort of twisted beauty into its deranged finale, helping us swallow the true horror of what’s unfolding before us. It challenged my sanity, and I loved it for it.
The child-snatching horror begins with father Santi and mother Maria in the park with their daughter Alicia. One minute she’s playing in the sandpit, the next… she’s gone. As the police investigation stalls, Santi, whose perspective we see the story through, starts to unravel and the remnants of his life begin to fall apart, but desperate hope comes with a clue: the whisper of a strange figure known as “He who does not speak with children”. The quest, however, to find this figure will take Santi to a new level of unspeakable horror.
The first remarkable, and remarkably difficult to read, thing about this novella is how the author treats the POV of Santi and his journey. No father would be expected to take such a situation well, but Santi’s path of grief is so wretched, that, like all good transgressive horror, it forces the reader to ask difficult questions: yes, he is undergoing an impossible situation, but does he have a responsibility to his wife (who, crucially, is pregnant with their second child) to manage it better? Was he a good husband to begin with? But even by questioning this, I started to question whether I was guilty of a failure of empathy. But does he deserve mine? These moral dilemmas, even before the true horror began, gave this book, which I devoured in one sitting, an unsettling extra layer of moral quandary.
But then, as Santi grasps onto this new lead of the whispered figure “He who does not talk to children” and vows to do anything he can to follow it to his daughter, the book takes a turn into unimaginable horror that I simply didn’t see coming, and it is horrific, genuinely hard to take, like dipping an open wound into a salt bath. The author doesn’t hold back on this nerve-shredding examination of the dark paths that grief can take you, and soon we are onto the surrealist, nightmarish endgame. By this point the book has taken on the characteristics of a real nightmare, yet described with a grotesque sort of beauty, and the denouement, which continues to ask deep, unrelenting questions about parental responsibility and the selfishness of grief, is at once dreamlike and utterly, utterly hellish.
It’s also worth quickly noting the excellence of Alicia L. Alonso, who translated this from its original Spanish into English. So good was this translation and so lyrical and fluent is the prose that I would never guess it had been translated if I hadn’t known prior. In an age where big publishers have begun to shamefully toy—or hint at planning to toy— with the apocalypse machine instead of hiring human translators, it’s important we emphasise that not only could AI not do this, but that we wouldn’t want it to either: the beauty of knowing the craft that has gone into this translation added to the wonder of this story.
Overall, this tale of a child gone missing and the unimaginably dark path her father will go down to get her back is transgressive horror at its finest: unrelentingly brutal, unexpectedly lyrical, unafraid to examine the difficult questions and laced with the twisted promise of hope that lies at the edge of insanity. If you can take it, you won’t forget it.
The child-snatching horror begins with father Santi and mother Maria in the park with their daughter Alicia. One minute she’s playing in the sandpit, the next… she’s gone. As the police investigation stalls, Santi, whose perspective we see the story through, starts to unravel and the remnants of his life begin to fall apart, but desperate hope comes with a clue: the whisper of a strange figure known as “He who does not speak with children”. The quest, however, to find this figure will take Santi to a new level of unspeakable horror.
The first remarkable, and remarkably difficult to read, thing about this novella is how the author treats the POV of Santi and his journey. No father would be expected to take such a situation well, but Santi’s path of grief is so wretched, that, like all good transgressive horror, it forces the reader to ask difficult questions: yes, he is undergoing an impossible situation, but does he have a responsibility to his wife (who, crucially, is pregnant with their second child) to manage it better? Was he a good husband to begin with? But even by questioning this, I started to question whether I was guilty of a failure of empathy. But does he deserve mine? These moral dilemmas, even before the true horror began, gave this book, which I devoured in one sitting, an unsettling extra layer of moral quandary.
But then, as Santi grasps onto this new lead of the whispered figure “He who does not talk to children” and vows to do anything he can to follow it to his daughter, the book takes a turn into unimaginable horror that I simply didn’t see coming, and it is horrific, genuinely hard to take, like dipping an open wound into a salt bath. The author doesn’t hold back on this nerve-shredding examination of the dark paths that grief can take you, and soon we are onto the surrealist, nightmarish endgame. By this point the book has taken on the characteristics of a real nightmare, yet described with a grotesque sort of beauty, and the denouement, which continues to ask deep, unrelenting questions about parental responsibility and the selfishness of grief, is at once dreamlike and utterly, utterly hellish.
It’s also worth quickly noting the excellence of Alicia L. Alonso, who translated this from its original Spanish into English. So good was this translation and so lyrical and fluent is the prose that I would never guess it had been translated if I hadn’t known prior. In an age where big publishers have begun to shamefully toy—or hint at planning to toy— with the apocalypse machine instead of hiring human translators, it’s important we emphasise that not only could AI not do this, but that we wouldn’t want it to either: the beauty of knowing the craft that has gone into this translation added to the wonder of this story.
Overall, this tale of a child gone missing and the unimaginably dark path her father will go down to get her back is transgressive horror at its finest: unrelentingly brutal, unexpectedly lyrical, unafraid to examine the difficult questions and laced with the twisted promise of hope that lies at the edge of insanity. If you can take it, you won’t forget it.
April 14, 2026
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.
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.
June 29, 2026
This book was painful and difficult and near perfect. As a mother, I haven't been able to read a lot of horror featuring children for the past decade, and I finally thought "well, maybe my kids are old enough and I'm ready." But nope, I'll never be ready. I just want to go hug my babies and never let them go.
I feel like the grief of child-loss is either told from the perspective of the unravelling mother or the vigilante-hero father. Instead, we get the messy, broken, unraveling father. He desperately wants his daughter back, but never once is he painted as a hero.
The book is bite-sized, which is probably all I could handle of the subject matter. But it is beautifully told and pulsatingly strange.
The art is also amazing.
I feel like the grief of child-loss is either told from the perspective of the unravelling mother or the vigilante-hero father. Instead, we get the messy, broken, unraveling father. He desperately wants his daughter back, but never once is he painted as a hero.
The book is bite-sized, which is probably all I could handle of the subject matter. But it is beautifully told and pulsatingly strange.
The art is also amazing.
May 25, 2026
Alicia is in the Basement is a painful slow burn that drips with dread. A dark decent into madness and heartbreak. This a disturbing read that will leave you chilled to your soul.
Thanks to Tenebrous Press for the review copy.
Thanks to Tenebrous Press for the review copy.
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