Woodworm, the debut novel of Spanish writer Layla Martinez, is the story of a haunted house told in alternating point-of-view chapters by an unnamed grandmother and granddaughter. Like any good ghost story, the house is only as haunted as its residents. No one’s ever heard of a well-adjusted, trauma-free person falling victim to a haunting. Then again—who’s ever heard of such a person at all?

The book opens with the granddaughter returning home from jail. She was accused in the disappearance of a boy she nannied but has returned home because the authorities have been unable to find enough evidence to incriminate her. With a matter-of-fact delivery reminiscent of We Have Always Lived in the Castle’s (1962) Merricat Blackwood, the granddaughter walks us through a house in which you shouldn’t check under the bed unless you recognize the shoes sticking out. The place might be as sinister as 29 Barton Road in White Is for Witching (2009), if it weren’t surrounded by equally powerful forces keeping it in check and women who have learned their lessons about following voices coming from the wardrobe. The granddaughter introduces a grandmother who speaks face-to-face with saints, who creeps around the house and garden like a woman come out of the wallpaper, and who posts guardian-angel prayer cards around her daughter’s and granddaughter’s beds (even though the old woman knows angels look more like praying mantises rather than blond beauties). On switching to the next chapter, however, the book subverts expectations when the grandmother immediately insists on a reconsideration of the granddaughter’s reliability as a narrator. Their alternating chapters fill in gaps and tell new lies, but we end with the realization that the truth has been present since the very first chapter—we just didn’t know what we were seeing yet.

Yet the Woodworm house, set among parched fields in rural Spain and built by “a pimp who lived off women,” hasn’t had its fill of those who live there; it’s hungry for more to fill its rooms and cabinets. The hate of the generations of women who are trapped within it is not enough for the house. It calls to it the shadows of those buried in unmarked graves, along the road or down in the ravine.

The translation of Woodworm from Spanish to English was undertaken by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott. Both translators have been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, Hughes in 2020 for Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season (2020) and McDermott in 2024 for Selva Almada’s Not a River (2024). They chose to preserve some of the narrators’ colloquialisms, translating them into English where possible (“cuz” instead of “because”) but preserving some Spanish. Cansao and comío, rather than academy-approved cansado and comido, and the granddaughter’s employers’ “pretentious drawn-out Ss, those over-the-top Ds” persist as untranslatable markers of class difference in the book (p. 82). This attention to linguistic discrimination is important for the book’s cultural context. A forced conformity to Castilian Spanish, accompanied by bans on regional languages like Catalan and Euskara, was part of the mid-twentieth-century Francoist agenda of Spanish cultural unity. The shadows that come to take up residence in the house are explicitly referred to as victims of the “little walks,” a sinister euphemism for those knocks on the door in the middle of the night that disappeared members of the community during Franco’s White Terror.

Language allows us to hide certain horrors. We can say someone has “depression” rather than “dying of a broken heart,” or that they “keep secrets” rather than that they’re a “liar” (pp. 145, 50). Much like Woodworm’s house, language is “either protecting us or smothering us or maybe both,” covering itself in domesticated pleasantries (p. 13). In the novel’s swapping voices, the narration betrays itself in similar ways, projecting, in true Gothic tradition, violent desires onto a house, and onto a landscape, that are ultimately derived from the chambers of these women’s hearts. But buried underneath the supernatural horror in this book, as restless as the house, are the horrors of Spain’s past, poisoning each interaction between members of the community.

Following the death of Francisco Franco in 1975, Spain entered into el Pacto del Olvido, the Pact of Forgetting. To ease the transition to democracy, amnesty was granted to those who committed crimes against humanity during the decades of Francoist rule, when tens of thousands of people (perhaps hundreds of thousands by some estimates) were killed. Just this past year, the Law of Democratic Memory was passed by the Spanish Parliament to support the exhumation and identification of remains of the disappeared and to require that lessons about the dictatorship be taught in secondary schools, yet right-wing politicians threaten its implementation. [1] The lingering effects of the Pact also continue to be challenged not just internationally but domestically—that is, within the home and village and family. The legacy of the Pact is intimate. People knew well which neighbors likely snitched on their fathers, sons, mothers, daughters and never faced repercussions. Woodworm is about the hatred that worms its way in through this forced forgetting. Justice denied accrues interest. The grandmother, known for her work with her saints, helps people collect in whatever way they can:

I put curses on relatives, policemen, priests, informers, whoever, with all the hatred in these guts of mine, and in the house’s guts too, because I knew that once we poor folk started collecting our debts they wouldn’t have so much as a pigsty to hide in. (p. 93)

Martinez refers in interviews to the usefulness of horror as a genre. It comes with its own set of symbols, readily understood by audiences, which allow exploration of collective trauma and open wounds. [2] We all understand what it is to feel trapped in a place, to feel the lifeforce drained from us, to feel haunted by memory. Woodworm is about the legacy of state violence. But more than that, it’s also about how those at the margins bear the brunt of its weight. Even in a nation not at war with its citizens, the women of this family would be subject to systemic violence due to their poverty or intimate violence due to their gender. There’s a twisted sense of humor towards it throughout the book, like when the granddaughter speaks of her interview outfit that lends an air of “total willingness to be brutally exploited,” but their precarity tinges any interactions the women have with other villagers and with each other (p. 7).

There are two primary modes of haunted house in literature: the get-out house, that wants to be left alone and pulls out all the bleeding walls and jumpscares to evict the unlucky living residents, and the hungry house, that insists you stay awhile. Woodworm falls into the latter category and vamps on it, assigning the women the same dark hunger in their desire for vengeance against their men, their employers, their neighbors. The violence manifests as the titular woodworm in their bodies, a “gnawing restlessness … that won’t leave you in peace or let you leave others in peace either,” a “cracracra” refrain that moves constantly against the walls and scrapes inside their skulls (p. 67). But what sets Woodworm apart is its ultimate denial of escape or catharsis. Even if the violence of the past is reckoned with there is the everyday violence of existing in capitalism and patriarchy. The house may be silent for a time, but there’s always room for one more.

Endnotes

[1] Marc Martorell Junyent, “Spain’s Memory Law Hasn’t Banished the Ghosts of Francoism,” Jacobin, January 14, 2024, https://jacobin.com/2024/01/spain-memory-law-ghosts-francoism. [return]

[2] Alba Correa, “’Carcoma’: el fenómeno literario que bate la tierra y despierta fantasmas,” Vogue España, February 9, 2022, https://www.vogue.es/living/articulos/carcoma-libro-layla-martinez-entrevista. [return]