Ocultos by Laura Pérez

I thought Ocultos was a single narrative, but the back cover describes it as "an array of stories," which means my attempts while reading it to figure out how all of these people are connected to each other might not have been useful, or fruitful.

Laura Pérez is a Spanish cartoonist and illustrator - her work most famously seen recently in the credits for the TV show Only Murders in the Building - of mostly moody and allusive work, light pencil lines anchored by big blocks of solid colors, with particular attention to inky blacks. I saw her book Totem not long ago - that is a single narrative, and is actually a slightly later book originally than Ocultos, though their publication was flipped for the US.

Ocultos was a 2019 book - a collection rather than a single thing, as I noted, though clearly a themed collection with a central idea - that was translated by Andrea Rosenberg for this 2024 US edition. It has about a hundred and fifty story pages, including blanks and title pages between stories, all in a horizontal, half-size format that mostly uses panels conventionally rather than trying to be cinematic or otherwise break the form.

The woman on the cover is central. I think she's Daira - that name is used once, and it is reasonable to assume that all of the women that look like her are her. But this is a book of secret and occult connections, of "hidden worlds full of unknown forces," as the publisher's description puts it. So it, like Totem, is a book to be experienced and felt rather than intellectualized or explicated.

All of the characters in Ocultos have encounters with the inexplicable, or are looking to have encounters with the inexplicable. A store - Daira works there, I think - with an extensive occult section shows up multiple times, with events involving crowds all wearing masks. Characters talk to themselves or to each other about odd things they have witnessed: not the same kinds of things, just unexplained events.

This is not a book about ghosts or aliens or nature spirits or anything else like that - it's about all of them and none of them, in a very non-specific way. None of the people in Occultos put names or definitions to their experiences; they just have things happen to them, and we either see those fleeting odd moments or hear them talk about their experiences afterward.

And most of these people don't have names. We don't know who they are, or how they connect. The point is the moments, all of the connection points to the numinous, rather than how they connect to each other in the normal, everyday world. Unfortunately, I am very much an everyday-world kind of reader, looking for actual narrative and named characters doing identifiable things that have connections to other things happening in the same book. So I was left somewhat cold by Ocultos: it is very pretty, and evocative at times, and many of the stories in it are interesting and all of them are well-constructed and thoughtful. But it doesn't seem to add up to anything in particular; it's just a clump of stories that mostly seemed to me to end with "and something happened I didn't understand; oh well; on to the next thing." Your reaction may be different, particularly if you have a higher tolerance for mysticism and vagueness.