If innocence is a quality of the spirit that indicates the absence of guilt, the characters in these stories abound in simple women and men who, nevertheless, face terrible situations within whose folds lurks pure evil, embodied by power-hungry police officers, Kafkaesque bureaucrats, criminals, selfish lovers, abusive husbands, or wild dogs ready to devour them. What can be done in the face of such blows of fate? Hiram Ruvalcaba follows his creatures step by step, tracing the existential, human path that leads them from their defenseless circumstances to the action that will either allow them to emerge victorious from the violence in which they find themselves immersed, or that will ultimately plunge them hopelessly into misfortune and guilt.

Harsh, sometimes stark stories in which the author does not hesitate to expose murder, humiliation, cruelty, and bitterness, the nine pieces that make up The Innocents stand out as much for their technical and stylistic quality as for their exploration of the positive and negative aspects of human nature. The result is a sort of compendium of the behaviors to which extreme situations push those who, unintentionally, are forced to carry out something reprehensible, those who do not value the lives of others, or those who were born and raised amidst violence and have never known a different environment.

A novelist, essayist, and translator, with The Innocents, his most recent collection of short stories, Hiram Ruvalcaba confirms himself as one of the leading practitioners of the genre in our country: a profound narrator, master of precise and versatile prose, always searching for the most appropriate way to tell stories that take readers out of their comfort zone, making them shudder and rethink the life around them.