Minor Deities (Deidades menores)

A young man grapples with a force that has dominated mankind since its very beginning. 

Raymundo must take care of his father in his last days of life. This is why, after many years, he returns to his hometown of Villa Sola, a Mexican village located far away from civilization, where Ray lived as a young misfit. He survived on adventure novels. His sister Margo was the most popular at school, his father worked in a hardware store, and his mother was a housewife.  

In that desolate and lost town, a group of peculiar old people arrive in a caravan and settle in a camp located in the outskirts of the city. One of them is tattooed from head to toe, another is missing an arm and behaves strangely… and these elders seem to bring something more than just their presence, something darker and more powerful.

From this moment on, strange things begin to happen in the village, including a series of deaths suffered by several of its inhabitants. Ray, restless and anxious, decides to investigate these mysteries. The second death is that of Margo’s boyfriend, who appears to have died in a car accident because of drunk driving. However, Ray suspects that what happened is not only related to his alleged carelessness. He discovers that one of the elders had gotten him drunk and that the car tried to avoid a white fox that ran into the middle of the road. After an attempt to report them to the police, Ray ends up frustrated and desperate when no one believes him. As if that were not enough, his family problems multiply: Margo runs away with her drama teacher and her mother had been cheating on her father with the police officer.

Back to the present, Ray’s father has passed. The village police officer – his mother’s lover at the time – reveals some of the secrets he had longed to discover as a young man about the murders and about the elders.

Ray discovers that the elders were not who they said they were… they were even more dangerous and ancestral than he could have ever imagined: a force that has dominated mankind since its beginnings. They were disguised divinities -Ares, Greek God of War; Ganesha, Indian God of arts and sciences; the Mexican Tezcatlipoca; and the white Japanese fox Kitsune. 

RELEVANT DATA: Minor Deities (Deidades menores) is a true character-driven story. Ray’s character slightly resembles the protagonist of the successful novel The Curious Incident of the Dog at Midnight, due to the fact that he is very endearing and, despite his age, he has the curiosity, intelligence and passion to investigate crimes that even adults seem incapable of solving. 

The novel is the winner of the prestigious ¨Una Vuelta de Tuerca¨ National Award, given to crime novels. The writer behind the work is F.G. Haghenbeck, an international best-selling author whose works have been translated into nearly twenty languages, including German, English and Chinese.  

He has also received the Nocte Award for Best Foreign Book, the Gourmand Award in France (making him the first Latin American author to receive that distinction), the Jose Ruben Romero Fine Arts Award for Novels, the Norma LIJ Award, and the Bram Stoker Award for his work on El diablo me obligó – a novel that was adapted for the Netflix series El Diablero.  

What the critics have said:

“A thrilling and mysterious book, which, in addition to the main plot, also battles with forgiveness and the loneliness of a young boy without close friends or family. A must-read story.” Goodreads  

“Minor Dieties (Deidades Menores) is an excellent novel […] with strokes of mystery, a bit of fantasy, […] touches of magical realism, characters so fantastic that you’re going to end up getting attached to them.” Trance de Letras (literary blog)

AUDIOVISUAL POTENTIAL: TV Series, Miniseries, Film, TV Movie. 

LANGUAGES AVAILABLE: Spanish.