Alana S Portero’s debut novel La mala costumbre, or Bad Habit, starts at an intensity of 11 and barely lets up. The first time the protagonist falls in love, aged five, is with her neighbour’s bloodied corpse after he has plunged to his death in a drug-induced stupor. He is a fallen angel to her: “I simply yearned with my entire soul to kiss something so lovely and helpless.”
This juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane runs throughout the rest of the novel, from its title to the many secondary characters, each of which is assigned a mythical double: the abusive man who lives across the hall is Bluebeard, his daughters Lady Godiva and Joan of Arc. Portero’s background as a historian lends these parallels depth and perspicacity, elevating what might otherwise be an unremittingly bleak story into a higher realm. As the protagonist gets older, she spends her nights in the arms of “dragon-men”, who are “tall, dark, and potbellied”, in an attempt to find the self-worth that is denied her elsewhere in life.
