Mortal Vengeance: A Grim Tale, by Alejandro Torres De la Rocha, is a psychological thriller that works like an origin story: it follows a 17-year-old senior at the Jesuit-run Excelsior Academy, as the school’s cruelty, silence, and “character-building” discipline quietly shape the conditions for the future Grim Cojuelo killings. It’s framed as the “howdunit” prequel to another book in the same universe, tracing how institutional rot and personal guilt turn a Dominican folklore figure, the limping devil reimagined as a hunter, into something inevitable.

I really enjoyed the cinematic writing. The book opens with a staged, almost spoken-word setup, with a narrator and the killer stepping in like voices in a dark theater, and it keeps that heightened, performative feel even in ordinary moments. The school itself is described with a kind of glossy dread: stained glass, marble, crucifixes everywhere, and beauty that feels like a trap. Sometimes the language is intense, almost daring you to look away. It works, especially when it’s tied to sensory detail and not just mood. Other times, it can feel a little crowded with emphasis, like the book underlining its own points. Still, the voice commits. It wants you inside Julián’s head, where guilt is not abstract; it’s a pressure in the chest.

The author’s big choice, and I mean this in a good way, is to make the horror feel system-made. The most frightening scenes are not supernatural. They’re social. A teacher humiliates a student in public, classmates freeze, phones come out, and nobody with power stops it. Then you get a philosophy class where a priest asks, calmly, if it’s ever okay to lie, and suddenly the book is talking about survival, complicity, and the cost of telling the truth in a place that punishes it. That’s where the psychological thriller genre really clicks for me: it’s less about jump scares and more about watching a closed world tighten its rules until someone breaks. If you like school-set dread where the building itself feels like a character, it reminded me at times of the slow-burn pressure and moral rot in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, and the “this place is shaping you” inevitability you get in Stephen King’s novel Carrie, even though the voice and cultural lens here are very much its own.

I’d recommend A Grim Tale to readers who want their thriller to have teeth, especially people interested in stories about institutions, religious power, and how silence gets enforced. One note, it does not tiptoe around heavy material, including trauma and grooming, so you really have to be in the right headspace. But if you’re drawn to psychological thrillers where the scariest thing is watching a system teach people to look away, you’ll appreciate what this book is doing, and how patiently it builds the sense that the monster is being assembled in plain sight.

Pages: 571 | ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0FPBB3ZDL