Nationality Spanish Genre Horror, fantastic | Name Rafael Llopis Role Essayist | |
 | ||
Notable works Historia natural de los cuentos de miedo, Los mitos de Cthulhu, ed., El novisimo Algazife o Libro de las Postrimerias | ||
Historia natural del cuento de miedo de rafael llopis
Rafael Llopis Paret (born Madrid, April 17, 1933), Spanish psychiatrist, essayist and translator, specializing in fantasy and horror fiction.
Contents
He studied medicine at the Universidad Complutense of Madrid. As a psychiatrist, worked in various health centers in the Comunidad de Madrid until his retirement, in 1998.
Since his high school years he was interested in fantasy, that in the absence of publications in Castilian read fluently in French. With the English of the high school and a dictionary began to read Sheridan Le Fanu, one of the authors of his choice, and other writers of fantastic literature not available in French. He is considered, along with the translator Francisco Torres Oliver, one of the best introducers of the genre of mystery and macabre in Spanish.
Llopis is an authority in H. P. Lovecraft, an author barely known in Spain until his publication of the famous anthology Los mitos de Cthulhu (1969) (see Cthulhu Mythos), collecting for the first time many stories of authors called of the Lovecraft Circle, as Robert E. Howard, Frank Belknap Long, Clark Ashton Smith, etc., as well as his direct literary heirs: Robert Bloch, Ramsey Campbell and August Derleth, among others.
Llopis was also responsible for Cuentos de terror (Editorial Taurus, 1963), the extensive study Esbozo de una historia natural de los cuentos de miedo (Editorial Júcar, 1974) and the three-volume edition of the Antología de cuentos de terror (Alianza Editorial, 1981).
He is also the author of the collection El novísimo Algazife o Libro de las Postrimerías, "unclassifiable book that proposes a new reading of the myth of Cthulhu and of the Egyptians, who matches between vampires, aliens and haunted Moors, in a dance macabre as those of the last millennium" (from back cover).
In the 1985 Siruela book Literatura fantástica, he published one of his essays: El cuento de terror y el instinto de la muerte, along with other texts of Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Carlos García Gual, etc. In this essay, Llopis defined the weird tale as that genre «whose primary purpose is to produce, such as Walter Scott said, "a nice shiver of supernatural terror". I refer to a type of story whose raw material is not so much death itself as what it has or may have after death: the supernatural, the living from the beyond».
In 2013 he published a corrected reprint of his Historia natural de los cuentos de miedo [Natural History of Weird Tales]. Critic and writer José Luis Fernández Arellano collaborated with him in this work updating its contents.