Synopses & Reviews
From the psychomagical guru who brought you The Holy Mountain and Where the Bird Sings Best comes a supernatural love-and-horror story in which a beautiful albino giantess unleashes the slavering animal lurking inside the men of a Chilean village.A darkly funny, surreal novel set in Chile and Peru, Albina and the Dog-Men is Alejandro Jodorowsky’s sprawling modern myth in which sexual desire appears as a dangerous and generative force that mutates and transforms, unraveling identities and rending the social and moral fabric of a small town.
Written with the stunning vision and cinematic flair he brought to his cult 1970s psychedelic freak-out films El Topo and The Holy Mountain, Jodorowsky turns the classic stranger-comes-to-town narrative on its head in his novel Albina and the Dog-Men. When two women—a beautiful amnesiac albino giantess and her protector, a leather-tough woman called Crabby—arrive in this South American desert town, Albina’s otherworldly allure and unfettered sensuality turns men into wild animals. Chased at the same time by a clubfoot criminal, Albina and Crabby must fend off their aggressors before the town consumes itself in an orgy of lust and violence.
A modern-day Kafka story on hallucinogens, with strong doses of mysticism and horror, Albina and the Dog-Men reads like an ancient folk tale whispered at night, fused with an urgent critique of contemporary society and gender relations. Woven through a Jodorowskian fabric of killer bees, enchanted parrots, witches, prostitutes, midgets, omnisexual couplings and men gone canine is a universal story of love against the odds and the things that make us human.
Review
“Jodorowsky uses his fertile imagination to present a mixed bag of historical and imaginary characters, such as the Inca King, Atahaulpa, and a cast of half-humans and half-beasts that possess magical powers… Very well crafted… Strongly recommended.”
Review
“The man of his time, which is to say, our time… A shaman and apprentice, always polemical, often wild, ubiquitous and cosmopolitan… A wild story with eroticism, nasty insults, nudity, sexuality, lyricism, and a magical-scatological aura… A pilgrimage in circles that leads its exhausted characters through forty years of mutations before arriving at its destination, the same, happy place in a novel (and in what an author!), which allows the reader to pass without transitions, even with frequent shocks from the scatological surreal of the mundane and magical in the search for that mystery made of eroticism, pain, and oblivion.”
Review
“One of the most important Latin American writers… An almost cinematic story, a novel that becomes more magical and mysterious each time a new page is turned… What awaits is a detailed story of the metamorphosis each one of the characters goes through… An impassioned and carnal novel like few that have been as well received by the general public.”
Review
“Lucid as few members of his generation are, Alejandro Jodorowsky has published Albina and the Dog-Men… Again, the aesthetic of which he already made a show in Where the Bird Sings Best: extreme magical realism to the limits of sexuality and spirituality… In the classic format of adventure novels, Jodorowsky proposes a search for the philosophy of sex through a literature that aims more for healing than for aesthetics. As Antonio Escohotado showed, the road toward beatitude starts with well-prepared genitals. And Jodorowsky knows it. Ideal for readers who aren’t as asexual as Tolkien, if that’s something that even exists.”
Review
“With the symbolism always utilized with mastery by Alejandro Jodorowsky in a transcendent purpose, Albina and the Dog-Men is a fantastical novel that goes far beyond the reader’s mere entertainment… With Albina and the Dog-Men, Jodorowsky looks to break mental and psychological taboos that prevent many people from being themselves… This book should be taken as a work destined to provoke the reflection of its readers… Only the life experience of a psychological maestro like Alejandro Jodorowsky could give birth to this excellent novel. Enjoy it!”
Synopsis
"Deeply psychological and mysterious, the book will stimulate the imagination of the reader's mind to the extreme." --Marina Abramovic
"In his latest novel, Jodorowsky builds on his multi-decade long assault of the public imagination.... a fantastical and genre-defying parable of love and friendship.... At its core, Albina and the Dog-Men is a love story about two people committed to one another's survival and to discovering their potential. And, as with life, it is sometimes only through the weathering of a storm that our true capacities are made clear." --NPR Books
When two women--an amnesiac goddess and her protector, a leather-tough woman called Crabby--arrive in a Chilean desert town, Albina's otherworldly allure and unfettered sensuality turn men into wild beasts. Chased by a clubfooted corrupt cop, evil corporate overlords, giant-hare-riding narcos, and Himalayan cultists, Albina and Crabby must find a magical cactus that will cure Albina and the men's monstrous affliction before the town consumes itself in an orgy of lust and violence.
Albina and the Dog-Men is Alejandro Jodorowsky's darkly funny, shocking, and surreal hybrid of mystical folktale, road novel, horror story, and social parable, ultimately uniting in a universal story of love against the odds and what makes us human.