There are external threats. Others lie within.
On a stormy night, Max arrives in Shimst, a remote village in the north of Scotland. At the entrance to the seemingly deserted hamlet, a sign bears four unsettling words: Do What Thou Wilt. By the following morning, the storm has cut the place off from the outside world. Trapped among the mountains, Max begins to experience visions of a past he does not recognize as his own. Something-or someone-interferes with his perception, distorting his relationship with reality.
The outer world is hostile and impenetrable, but it is the inner space that becomes truly threatening, as his mind ceases to be a safe territory and his identity turns uninhabitable. What he once believed most intimate-his thoughts, his memories, his will-begins to disintegrate.
With echoes of Ernesto Sábato and Patricia Highsmith, and permeated by the twisted shadow of Aleister Crowley, Black Bile constructs a psychological labyrinth in which horror does not arise from the supernatural, but from the domination exerted over consciousness and the fragility of a fractured self.
- DIARIO DE OAXACA -
"Samantha Devin weaves each paragraph with the cool composure of Patricia Highsmith while constructing a gothic architecture of inner horror. Black Bile carries all those elements with the addition of psychological labyrinths where the obsessions of Ernesto Sábato and Edgar Allan Poe endure."
- EUROPA PRESS -
"An unsettling walk through the abyss of madness. Black Bile is a disconcerting work steeped in a dark and disturbing atmosphere. The outcome of this narrative thread is a solid and excellent story that hooks the reader from the first pages. Samantha Devin moves in the genre like a fish in water, sustaining the reader's interest intensely on every page and creating an expert, highly addictive atmosphere of suspense."
- EL PAÍS -
"Knowing reality can become our worst nightmare."
- EL MUNDO -
"Samantha Devin publishes her first novel, approaching the dizzying edge of mental illness and questioning the very concept of reality."
Samantha Devin is the acclaimed author of Arcadia: A Modern Tragedy and Heroica. Her work, published internationally, blends literary fiction with contemporary metaphysics.
