Albina and the Dog-Men

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 — 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.