In Evil Hour
Gabriel García Márquez's 1962 novel, written before One Hundred Years of Solitude, takes place in a small Colombian town where anonymous lampoons begin exposing the townspeople's secrets. The result is less magical than suffocating: a portrait of a community eating itself under a dictator's quiet sponsorship. It is an early display of the controlled rage that would define his best work.The Avon edition presents the novel in a small paperback format, appropriate for a book that is brief, bitter, and easy to underestimate. It belongs on the same shelf as No One Writes to the Colonel and Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and it rewards the reader who distrusts small towns on principle, and who recognizes that anonymity can be a weapon as well as a shield.
