Animals go mad and men die (accidentally and not) at a slaughterhouse in an impoverished, isolated corner of Brazil. In a landscape worthy of Cormac McCarthy, the river runs septic and sludgy with blood. Edgar Wilson makes the sign of the cross on the forehead of a cow, then stuns it with a mallet. He does this over and over and over again, the stun operator at Mr. Milo’s slaughterhouse: reliable, responsible, quietly dispatching cows and following orders, wherever that may take him. It’s important to calm the cows, especially now that they seem so unsettled. One runs headlong into the side of a barn, 22 more hurl themselves off the side of a cliff. Bronco Gil, their foreman, thinks it’s a jaguar or a wild boar, Edgar Wilson does not. But what is certain is that there is something in this desolate corner of Brazil driving men, and animals, to murder and madness.
Author
Ana Paula Maia (Nova Iguaçu, 1977) is a Brazilian writer, scriptwriter and musician. During her adolescence she player at a punk rock band and studied piano. As a scriptwriter she took part in the script of the short film O entregador de pizza (2001), and along with Mauro Santa Cecilia and Ricardo Petraglia, she wrote the theatrical monologue O rei dos escombros assembled in 2003 by the Moacyr Chaves firm. She published her first novel under the title O habitante das falhas subterrâneas in 2003. She is the author of the trilogy A saga dos brutos, started by the short novel Entre rinhas de cachorros e porcos abatidos y O trabalho sujo dos outros—published in one volume—and concluded by the novel Carvão animal. Influenced by Dostoievski, by Quentin Tarantino and Sergio Leone in her cinematography, and the pulp literature and series, her works are maked by the violence and the treatment of their characters, that often includes scatological elements.
