ABSTRACT
This chapter illuminates the overarching characteristics of contemporary post-Gothic fiction by reflecting on the strange and powerful force which make the dead manifest themselves as if they were alive. Los vivos y los muertos leverages this premise as a starting point, and, taking a step further, harbors its post-Gothic fiction under the simulacrum theories. For Jean Baudrillard, the phantasmization of reality is an irreversible process: Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The idea of the post-Gothic simulacrum becomes a reality since the initial narrations. Paz Soldan does not just merely play with the literary construction in Los vivos y los muertos on a post-Gothic-mode level, but also mocks, parodies, and ultimately dismantles the Arendtian banality of evil, the diabolical otherness, and the horror hermeneutics by vanishing and dissolving the semiotic framework upon which the novel is based.
