In The Twilight Zone, Nona Fernández (Space Invaders) uses her considerable empathetic power as a novelist to penetrate the darkest corners of Chile under Pinochet's dictatorship. Fernández blends historical facts and seemingly autobiographical details with what can only be imagined, reconstructing not only the inner lives of people tortured and "disappeared" by the regime's security apparatus, but that of one of the torturers. The chief figure in Fernández's book is the very real Andrés Antonio Valenzuela Morales, who in 1984 confessed shocking secrets that were eventually published under the headline "I TORTURED PEOPLE." Fernández uses Morales as a starting point to explore "the machinery of evil," a "parallel and invisible universe" of medieval torture and arbitrary executions.
The Twilight Zone sets out to answer questions that are unanswerable, questions separate from the thuggish reasoning behind Pinochet's reign of terror. Instead, many of the questions Fernández seeks to answer are about memory, collective trauma and denial. She refers to the world of interrogation cells and electric shocks as "the dark side," a "secret dimension" or "the Twilight Zone." Just as the television show depicted a secret world, "a universe unfolding outside the ordinary," so did Chileans occasionally catch glimpses of the grim secret world just under the surface of ordinary life.
Fernández musters her courage and empathetic imagination to stare into the Twilight Zone, to look deep into a secret world that many would prefer to ignore or forget. The Twilight Zone is a frank look into a nation's subconscious and the dark dreams that haunt victims and perpetrators alike. --Hank Stephenson, the Sun magazine, manuscript reader