Juan Preciado travels to Comala to find his father and discovers a ghost town, literally: everyone he meets is dead, and the novel moves through their voices like wind through empty streets. Rulfo published only this short novel and a book of stories, then fell silent for thirty years. The prose is spare, dreamlike, devastating. García Márquez said he memorized it and that it showed him what was possible. The heat of Comala is palpable; the whispers of the dead accumulate. Mexican literature pivots here. One hundred fifty pages contain a world of the dead that refuses to stay buried.