The narrator of Nona Fernández’s mesmerizing and terrifying novel The Twilight Zone is a child when she first sees this man’s face on the magazine’s cover with the words “I Tortured People.” His complicity in the worst crimes of the regime and his commitment to speaking about them haunt the narrator into her adulthood and career as a writer and documentarian.

A member of the secret police walks into the office of a dissident magazine and begins to talk to a reporter, who records his testimony. It is 1984 in Chile, in the middle of the Pinochet dictatorship.