Here’s a book that proves you don’t need five hundred pages and more to experience a thrilling impressive story. Clocking in at just over a hundred pages, On Earth As It Is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia is short and impossible to shake off once you’ve finished it.

The story takes us to a remote penal colony in Brazil, a place where the justice system has given up and punishment has taken its place instead. This is a facility built literally on top of the dead. Long before the prison existed, enslaved people were worked and killed on this same ground, and their bones never left. Now the inmates who dig graves for the colony’s own dead keep running into that older, buried history, layer after layer of violence stacked beneath their feet. It’s a brutal image, and Maia uses it to suggest something bigger: that cruelty doesn’t disappear once it’s done. It just gets buried and waits.

The colony runs a monthly ritual that makes the story become a slow-burn nightmare. Prisoners are released to run, and then they’re hunted. It’s less a monster-movie premise and more a study of what people become when survival is the only rule left, which makes it scarier. The horror here comes from watching ordinary human instinct curdle into something feral.

The characters are where this book really surprised me. Most of them are killers of one kind or another, and one is even a killer for hire, which you might expect to flatten them into archetypes. Instead, Maia gives them real psychological depth, enough that you find yourself understanding people you’d never want to meet.

What really hooked me in this book was how suspenseful the whole thing stays. Maia never lets the tension slacken. It’s spare and stripped-down, but somehow still beautiful.

None of this makes for a comfortable read. The subject matter is dark, and the ending lands with a real sting. The story shows how violence gets passed down and how thin the line really is between the past and the present.

If you’re drawn to dark literary fiction, this one belongs on your TBR list. It’s a fast read on paper, but the questions it raises about human nature, justice, and inherited violence will slow you right back down.

My Favorite Bits

• In the end, we’re all free because, in the end, we’ll be dead.

• Don’t fool yourself: old age doesn’t improve anyone’s character.

• Like I say: justice is always one step behind injustice.

• He could never live in society again; he’s eaten away by the system he defends.

• He doesn’t agree with any of his superior’s actions and it makes him miserable when the prisoners look at him with fellow feeling. What can he do, he’s not trained to have compassion or disobey. The feeling of hierarchy eats away at him like a worm.

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Author: Ana Paula Maia
Publication date: 1 May 2017
Number of pages: 101 pages

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