(Nota del editor: Una traducción al español de esta artículo se encuentra aqui.)
The Song of the Suicides is a Spanish-language novel whose characters experience the Jonestown tragedy only to find themselves 40 years later in a new tragedy, this time in Europe.
The novel tells how a Swiss forensic psychologist linked a suicide in the placid city of Basel in 2018 to a horrific event in Guyana in 1978: the largest massacre of American civilians on foreign soil, the mass murder/suicide event in Jonestown, which claimed 918 lives. Evidence shows that this is not just a case of imitation, but that there is a connection to the hundreds of psychotropic drugs used in Jonestown, which had a more sinister purpose than treating mental disorders.
Detective fiction and history intertwine in this action novel where pharmaceutical drugs, racial conflicts in the United States, the manipulation of cults by the secret services, behavior modification experiments, the Cold War, and modern legislation on assisted suicide collide in placid Europe, exactly forty years after the cruel events of Jonestown.
In the novel which I wrote in 2018, I attempt to offer an original approach to that tragic event, which has given rise to abundant historical documentation and numerous conspiracy theories about mind control and the abuse of hypnotic pharmaceutical drugs used in that utopian socialist experiment. However, numerous documents remain classified, and recordings remain to be cataloged, although they will add little more to such a tangled web of events. In the United States, it remains an event of great public significance. In Spain, however, the event went unnoticed, as we were attentive to the adoption of a constitution that would bury fifty years of dictatorship.
The historical gaps surrounding the Jonestown massacre allow me to place fictional characters in novelistic situations; to fancifully recreate scenes whose unfolding is unknown, such as Jones’s death; to imagine the hidden interests of pharmaceutical companies or the involvement of various intelligence services.
I apologize because some characters related to the Peoples Temple debacle are still alive, and perhaps my story might upset some relatives of the deceased. However, the historical digressions I have taken the liberty of including are fantasies that a novel can handle.
The Spanish edition is available on Amazon.com at the following link:
https://www.amazon.es/dp/B0F9SZHVDL