Juan Rulfo is the magical yet realistic godfather of a whole slew of crazy-famous Latin American writers. The novel's spooky switching between narrators, and the fact that most of them are, well, dead, makes it a predecessor for the Magical Realism movement popularized by writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges. However, the novel, along with his collection of short stories The Burning Plain, was enough to make him one of the most important Mexican writers of the 20th century. The book is the only novel Juan Rulfo ever published, and he was in his late thirties by the time it came out.

So the idea of dead town would have resonated with many Mexicans in the middle of the 20th century-it might remind them of their hometown. People were abandoning the countryside to move to greater opportunities in the city. In the 1950s, Mexico was becoming more and more urban. He was just interested in current affairs. What prompted Juan Rulfo to write this American Horror Story-worthy plotline? Was he an Ouija board fanatic, or really into séances? Nope. We'll leave it up to you to figure out which one of those statements in figurative, because one of them is more serious than a fright-induced heart attack. The narrator, who goes to the dusty old town of Comala in search of his father, Pedro Páramo, finds himself both sorting through the skeletons in his father's closet and conversing with the ghosts of the townspeople. The setting of Juan Rulfo's 1955 novel, Pedro Páramo, is, quite literally, a ghost town. You thought your town was dead and boring in the summertime, but you haven't been to Comala, Mexico.

პედრო პარამო by Juan Rulfo