The Erased
TWO KILLERS
TWO OPPOSITE WORDS
TWO DILEMMAS
In the northern Spanish region of Galicia, a killer kidnaps women early in the mornig on their way to work. Invisible women. Erased women.
In Madrid, another killer targets billionaires, leaving on the walls of their homes the same message: KILL THE RICH.
Two killers. Two opposite worlds. And in the light of a general frenzy, a confrontation between social classes like never before. Explosive.
What’s at stake becomes gradually clearer for Lucia Guerrero, the investigator with the Guardia Civil, and what she sees is dizzying. Lucia receives messages from an unknown sender, and the question that begs an answer is: has she become a mere plaything in the hands of two killers?
A razor-sharp thriller & an audacious climax
A web of mysteries & incandescent social rage
Bernard Minier masterfully manipulated his reader’ expectations right up to the last page
Author's interview
The series adaptation of your novel LUCIA will come out either on the platforms or on the big screen. That’s a very ambitious project. Can you tell us about it?
Yes, it’s an undertaking by Nostromo Pictures and Adrian Guerra, producers of successful movies such as Buried with Ryan Reynolds, Red Lights, with Robert de Niro and Sigourney Weaver, Gunman with Sean Penn and Javier Bardem, the Spanish series God’s Crooked Lines and The Invisible Guardian adapted from the novel by Dolores Redondo for Netflix. The Show Runner ought to become one of Spain’s best! That’s not nothing!
What did you intend by depicting two opposite ends of the wealth spectrum. Were you trying to underline the inequalities that are tearing our social fabric apart?
It’s interesting because recently I was rereading an interview with Romain Gary from 1968 that answers that question perfectly. He was talking about the “society of provocation.” He said that “every minute of the night and day, on television, in the streets, in the newspapers, the public is drowning under an endless loop of images of extraordinary wealth and comfort that always come with the same directive: buy, buy, buy!”. I wonder what he’d say about our present, now that this phenomenon is a thousand times more visible and invasive. Further in the same interview, Gary also says the following: “Young people are conditioned by protest. When a young person feels he or she can’t stop the war in Vietnam (the book is set in 1968), they burn down their school. Young people need to set themselves free one way or another.” That’s exactly what’s happening in The Erased.
Another thread in your book: violence towards women. You address the theme of incels. Could you tell us more?
“Incels” stands for for “involuntary celibates”. It’s about men who for various reasons can’t have or maintain a love or sexual relationship with a woman and who form communities on the internet, on forums such as Reddit or 4Chan, where they propagate misogyny, hatred toward women and even condone rape and violence against them, accusing women of being responsible for everything that hasn’t worked out for them. They encourage men to make women “submit.” Their heroes are people like Elliot Rodger, who killed six people on a campus in California in 2014, motivated by a hatred for women, leaving behind a 140-page manifesto. Or even Alek Minassian, who drove his car into a crowd, aiming for women, on April 23rd, 2018, in Toronto, killing ten people.
To be a writer, an author once said, is to “look open-eyed into the darkness, and be available to receive what isn’t obvious to the naked eye”. Do you think a writer should go further than that, and question our social system?
Let me be clear, The Erased is first and foremost a thriller full of unexpected twists and tension, not a novel about our social system. Nonetheless, and I think all of us novelists are aware of what’s going on, of the evolutions of our society, of the dangers that lurk beneath it, the shadows that increasingly insinuate themselves into our lives, threatening our peace, stability, way of life, certainties, and our future. In The Erased, what isn’t visible to the naked eye is the women of the book’s title, the invisible women who get up before everyone else to help keep the world turning, these women are not only invisible, but “erased” somehow from the surface of the Earth by the ones kidnapping them, making them disappear, leaving their dead bodies behind.
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