César Dávila Andrade: El Relato Fantástico Entre El Horror Suprarreal Y El Horror Metafísico

With the examination of the stories and a short novel by the Ecuadorian César Dávila Andrade, through close reading, an attempt was made to establish his relationship with fantastic and gothic literature. We show that Dávila Andrade, although he expressed his spiritual and esoteric searches in certain stories, little by little he adopted the code of the fantastic and the modality of the Gothic, even anticipating in his time the South American Gothic or Neo-Gothic of the 21st century. Thus, the themes present in his literary work explore death, illness or evil, the monstrous, making the sinister, the weird and the creepy stand out with disturbing nuances. It is perceived that in his work the tension between illness-death or death-illness represents the blockage of hope, a fact that makes us think about his passage from suprareal horror to metaphysical horror. Even the idea of (his) suicide as a moral act could have an explanation from the literary fantastic.