True Crime’s Gothic Realism: Uncanny Masculinities, Haunted Meatscapes, and the Aesthetics of Adjacency in Selva Almada’s Chicas muertas

Abstract

This article analyses Selva Almada’s Chicas muertas (2014), a nonfiction crime novel that centres on three femicides that occurred in 1980s Argentina. While the novel can be classified as true crime, the article is concerned with uncovering a discernible tension between true crime’s commitment to a rationalist presentation of facts, on the one hand, and the text’s Gothic elements, on the other. Far from eliding true crime’s reality principle, however, these elements are core to Almada’s detective work and can be construed as part of a project whose objective is to cognitively and affectively map femicide. By favouring a logic of synchronicity and adjacency over diachronicity and causality, Almada exposes the limitations of inscribing femicide within a conventional investigative framework, while also unveiling the uncanny aspects to the structures and figurative landscapes that accompany and abet femicide. The article goes on to make some general observations about true crime as Gothic realism.