RaveAsymptoteIf all this sounds a bit high camp, that’s because it is. Herrera isn’t concerned with restraint, or showing rather than telling, or anything so boring as the default middlebrow realism or polite language games of much English-language fiction. A bit like a narcocorrido, Kingdom Cons takes the materials of Mexico’s present and presses them into older forms. Those forms endue a frequently unbearable present with formal weight, comforting fatalism, and a certain saving weirdness … Kingdom Cons, like the novels that preceded it, is serious only in that it’s fundamentally unserious, a treatise on modern cultural subjectivities only in that it’s also an entertainment. As much as form, it’s about process. The Artist’s only concern is to be a conduit for whatever it is that has hold of him: music, loyalty, words.
