Pedro the Vast

Simon Lopez Trujillo's 'mind-blowing' debut takes readers into a dry and degraded, fire-prone landscape where humanity has encroached a step too far into the natural world, and a deadly fungus mounts its own resistance.

In the disorienting, devastatingly tense world of Lpez Trujillo, a eucalyptus farm worker named Pedro starts coughing. Several of his coworkers die of a strange fungal disease, which has jumped to humans for the first time, but Pedro, miraculously, awakes. His survival fascinates a foreign mycologist, as well as a local priest, who dubs his mysterious mutterings to be the words of a prophet. Meanwhile Pedro's kids are left to fend for themselves: the young Cata, whose creepy art projects are getting harder and harder to decipher, and Patricio, who wasn't ready to be thrust into the role of father. Their competing efforts to reckon with Pedro's condition eventually meet in a horrifying climax that readers will never forget.

For readers of Jeff Vandermeer and Samanta Schweblin, Lpez Trujillo is a next-generation Bolao with a fresh, speculative edge and a mind that's always one step ahead of us.

About the author

Simón López Trujillo is a Chilean writer and translator whose works include El vasto territorio (2021), Maestranza (2018), and Intemperie (2017). He has been awarded the Roberto Bolaño Award and has received grants and fellowships from the Chilean Ministry of Arts & Culture, the Pablo Neruda Foundation, and MacDowell.

Robin Myers is a poet and translator. She won the 2025 National Book Award in Translated Literature for We Are Green and Trembling, by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara. Other recent translations include Death Takes Me by Cristina Rivera Garza (co-translated with Sarah Booker), Restoration by Ave Barrera (co-translated with Ellen Jones), and A Father Is Born by Andrés Neuman, among many other works of poetry and prose.

Product details

• Authors: Simón López Trujillo, Simon Lopez Trujilo
• Assisted by: Robin Myer (Translation), Robin Myers (Translation)
• Publisher: Scribe Publications
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Release: 12.02.2026
• EAN: 9781917189354
• ISBN: 978-1-917189-35-4
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; Science Fiction, Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), FICTION / Literary, FICTION / Science Fiction / General, FICTION / Dystopian, Fiction in translation, Thriller / suspense, Speculative fiction, Horror & ghost stories, Psychological thriller, FICTION / Nature & the Environment, FICTION / World Literature / Chile, Narrative theme: Environmental issues / the natural world, Modern and contemporary fiction: literary and general, FICTION / Horror / General, Contemporary horror, ghost stories and supernatural fiction