THE STRANGERS

After mysterious lights soar over their village, a Spanish couple receives two strange visitors.

Jon and Katharina drudge through remote freelance gigs at Jon’s childhood home, a large house on the Cantabrian coast that they're housesitting for the winter. The two work on separate floors and grow distant as they settle into their separate routines, tension and boredom filling the gap between them. One rainy night, they observe an unsettling light display outside their window: There's a red triangle, a green circle, and a blue oval soaring and seemingly dancing in the sky. By the next morning, the village is flooded with ufologists, who make camp on the coast and heckle the locals for their accounts of the previous night’s events. As if this wasn't enough to shake Jon and Katharina out of their stagnancy, they are then approached by other visitors: Jon’s distant cousin Markel and Virginia, his withdrawn, enigmatic assistant, who seek a brief respite from their world travels. Jon has no memory of having met Markel—who claims to have been raised by his grandfather in Chile—and is hesitant to invite the intruders to stay. At his parents’ (and, surprisingly, Katharina’s) insistence, Jon relents, and Markel and Virginia make themselves comfortable. Perhaps too comfortable. The story's pace accelerates as the visitors transgress their hosts' boundaries, Virginia becoming increasingly unpredictable and Markel stoking Jon’s suspicions that they're not really related. Twists abound as the couple investigates the truth behind their guests’ motives, leading to a thrilling ending. With wry humor and tension that builds and discomfits, Spanish author Bilbao expertly explores our anxieties of otherness and the unknown.

Equal parts delightful and discomfiting, a distinctive approach to the science-fiction gothic.