Death and Violence

Throughout Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird, the author presents 20 nightmarish tales which centralize circumstances of and conflicts surrounding death and violence. In all of Bazterrica’s collected short stories, death crouches in the periphery of the narrators’ and characters’ minds and worlds. In “A Light, Swift, and Monstrous Sound,” the narrator’s quiet New Year’s Day is disrupted when her upstair’s neighbor Menéndez’s body falls onto her patio, “seconds after his dentures” (1). In “Candy Pink,” the second person narrator chooses to shoot herself in the head in order to deliver herself from her heartbreak. In “Earth,” the first person narrator Camila decides to kill her father because of his ongoing abuse of her mother. In “Teicher vs. Nietzsche,” Teicher’s plans to kill his cat go awry when he suddenly suffers a heart attack and effectively dies “of rage...