Books like The Transmigration of Bodies

Despite what I’ve read on the internet to the contrary, this novella was written before Signs Preceding the End of the World but translated into English after the latter. It’s not the work of genius Signs Preceding the End of the World is, but it’s still exceptional, carrying us into a gritty ‘underworld’ with interesting language in the matter of only 100 pages. Its trappings are noir but, for me, that’s not the appeal.Metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls, is what the title evokes, but it is bodies—living then dead—that migrate from one dark corner of the unnamed town to another. The Castro-Fonseca feud (a la Capulet-Montague) is one the fathers have forced upon their children, whom only pretend to be a part of it. The younger generation is the hope, as always; but is it, as always, too late? The respect given to dead bodies seems of a higher order than what is given to those bodies when alive. The daughter of one family tells the father of the other that his daughter wants her name, not her nickname, which is a diminishing one. Except in one instance, everyone else is also called by a nickname, or an appellation.The city is on lockdown due to a plague (a plague a’ both your houses!) thought to be transmitted by mosquitoes. Everyone should be wearing a mask (another reference to Romeo and Juliet?) but they are in short supply. The streets are mostly deserted and the protagonist wonders why everyone has so meekly accepted “enclosure” (within their homes) when the government has no clue as to what should be done, which I took to be a reference to the response to Mexico’s drug wars.Dark humor abounds, with live bodies being connected to both sex and death: the protagonist has slapped a mosquito biting his neck, yet searches for a condom to fulfill his need for another's body; a stripper wearing only a mask thrills a group of men as she teases taking it off. And then there’s the writing: not just interesting but some of it beautiful, especially a passage about silence and absence due to death. Once again I’ve found in a Herrera novella much more than you might think could be accomplished with such sparseness.