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"It's rich eating poor, literally." Raphael Montes is not afraid to shock when describing his book Jantar Secreto, which sold 500,000 copies in Brazil and has just been released in English — in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia.
The author says, although it portrays Brazilian multimillionaires who have a peculiar appetite for human flesh and are involved in a corruption scheme full of references to the country's politics, Secret Dinner has not encountered barriers abroad because, in the end, it is an allegory that interests the whole world.
"These are universal subjects: ambition, love, envy, laziness. No wonder, we watch the film Parasite and identify so much. There are Korean things — the relationship between the boss and the employee is different — but there are universal things, like social inequality. The question the film asks is who parasitizes who," he says, using the film that won the Oscar in 2020 as an example.
Secret Dinner, included in the New York Times list of novels that would make people talk in 2026, is not his first book released in the language. Almost a decade ago, Perfect Days, a translation of Dias Perfeitos, arrived on the international market, which also received a series adaptation by Globoplay.
But this is the first time that one of his works has reached the English-speaking public through a major publisher and occupied not only the shelves of foreign literature, but thrillers in general.
"Perfect Days came out with this translated literature tone. On the cover, there was a coconut tree — and there isn't even a coconut tree in the book, but it came out like that, because it's Brazilian", recalls the author.
"The Brazilian literature that reached the rest of the world had a certain exotic tone."
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One of the factors that helped change this scenario, he assesses, were streaming services, which popularized so-called glocal stories — a combination of the words global and local —, as narratives that portray elements of a certain territory without losing their appeal to the rest of the world are called.
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"The Americans, the English, have become accustomed to seeing interesting Korean and Spanish stories. You want to consume stories because they are good, not because they are from some country", he says.
The author says that, in fact, one of the elements that has most attracted the attention of foreign readers in Jantar Secreto is the mixture of the various subgenres of detective literature, the so-called crime fiction.
The division, which tends to be quite clear in the English-language book market, matters little in Brazil. The book was also published in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Russia.
"They wonder if it's a thriller or a horror, because it's a thriller, a race against time, but it also has elements of gore, horror, and at the same time it's fun. They're struggling to catalog the book."
The difficult career of a writer
Before setting out abroad, Montes had already established himself as one of the most successful contemporary writers in Brazil.
Today, it is close to reaching the mark of 2 million books sold. For comparison purposes, the average circulation of a launch in Brazil is 3 thousand copies.
Still, the writer, who graduated in Law and was studying to become a judge before his literary career took off, makes a reservation: "It's dangerous to say that you can live as a literary author in Brazil."
"I would feel irresponsible to say that. I would say more: it is dangerous to write literature to make money. Literature is not good for that. Literature has to be a parallel activity and, suddenly, it can become your main activity", he says.
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He says he only abandoned his legal career when invitations to write scripts for films, series and soap operas began to appear.
Among his works made exclusively for the screen is Beleza Fatal, the first soap opera produced by HBO Max in Brazil. Although it did not reach audience figures comparable to those of traditional serials on TV Globo, the production broke records on the platform.
Today, the author sees his paths as a novelist and a screenwriter intertwined. While writing his most recent novel A Stranger in Bed, released in August, he told the idea to a Netflix executive, who also commissioned him to write a screen adaptation.
The film, starring Paolla Oliveira, Bella Campos and Emílio Dantas, has already been filmed and should premiere next year.
"In some way, I'm a lawyer who also writes books, a screenwriter who also writes books," he defines. "But, in my financial life, being a screenwriter plays a very important role in the monthly bills. It pays more."
Violence as criticism — and that generates criticism
Despite his foray into melodrama and humor with the soap opera Beleza Fatal, the guiding thread of Montes' work are stories of crimes, real or fictional, marked by scenes of explicit violence.
As Secret Dinner imagines an elite willing to do anything to obtain human flesh, it is not difficult to imagine, even without resorting to spoilers, what the story has in store for the reader.
"I bring the reflection of who is served at this dinner and who pays for it. Those who are served, without a doubt, are poor people, black people, women, gays", says the author, who immediately tries to make a warning: "This is in a tone of criticism of what, in theory, is not needed in society. Not in the tone of 'Raphael Montes loves to see women and gays being served'."
The warning does not arise by chance. The perception that the author, one of the most read in Brazil today, would be prejudiced or reinforce stereotypes of violence is a criticism that has accompanied him for almost 15 years, since the publication of his first story, Suicidas.
The book imagines a group of young people who decide to play Russian roulette, a game in which participants spin the barrel of a revolver with a bullet, point the gun at themselves and pull the trigger, counting on luck not to fire it.
His second novel, Dias Perfeitos, also does not shy away from scenes full of violence, portraying a university student who kidnaps his girlfriend in an attempt to convince her to maintain a relationship with him.
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In general, there is one constant among the victims of the crimes portrayed in his works: they are, for the most part, women.
In addition to Perfect Days, this characteristic is evident in A Woman in the Dark, about a young woman who witnesses the murder of her entire family while still a child; in Bom Dia, Verônica, which became a series on Netflix and follows a police clerk during investigations into cases of violence against women; in The Stranger in Bed, a young woman ends up dying by hanging in a ménage à trois.
There is frequent criticism that their stories, following what would be a convention in detective literature, reproduce a sexist bias, by portraying women as characters who are more fragile than men and, consequently, more vulnerable to threats.
Montes says he considers these questions legitimate.
"Crime, suspense, mystery and horror stories, for many years, explored violence against women in an almost fetishistic way. Fortunately, with the discussion we have today about machismo and the role of women, we have evolved as a society and it is up to literature that deals with violence to follow this reflection", he says.
But the author makes a note: in the same way that it is with laughter that one criticizes customs, it is with shock that one can criticize violence, including gender-based violence. He uses the example of the series Bom Dia, Verônica, starring Tainá Müller.
"The series was seen by hundreds of thousands of people and, at the end of each episode, a message came: if you suffer domestic violence, report it. And there were many calls received. Then I began to understand that telling stories is also a way of provoking outrage in people", he says.
"My goal is to entertain, but, over time, I saw the second layer that crime literature allows: generating conversation, discussion and indignation. But, when I receive criticism that I played a misogynistic character and, therefore, I am also misogynistic, it doesn't affect me, because that person doesn't know me. There are criticisms that are just misinformation noise."
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True crimes and supposed 'sadistic pleasure'
Montes also found himself involved in the debate about violence in the scripts he helped write for films about two high-profile crimes in Brazil: the cases of Suzane von Richthofen, who beat her parents to death in 2002, and that of Elize Matsunaga, who killed her husband, Marcos Kitano Matsunaga, in 2012.
Elize: Shadows of a Woman was released by Netflix this year. The Girl Who Killed Her Parents and The Boy Who Killed My Parents, about the Richthofen, arrived on Amazon Prime Video in 2021, reconstructing the crime from the perspectives of Suzane and the brothers Cristian and Daniel Cravinhos. The author also participated in the production of a series about the case.
Montes says he is not so interested in stories about real crimes, so-called true crimes, "because violence in real life is so banal, it doesn't make for literature." But he finds it curious that some people criticize this type of narrative while consuming police programs on television.
In his view, "true crime is a strong genre because people are interested in investigating the human mind." "I don't believe there are people who watch for sadistic pleasure," he says.
"So much so that the public that most consumes true crime is female, who, according to research, consume it because they want to understand why they suffer so much violence. It's a way of trying to understand the violence of human beings."
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That's why, he says, he imposes a condition for accepting invitations to work on these projects: that the productions have something to say beyond exploring crime on screen. "It's seeing what the specific case brings me to talk about human beings", he says, giving Matsunaga's film as an example.
"I see a desire to discuss marriage, power relations in marriage, cycles of violence, of this woman who believes she is going to live one life, but when she gets there, she lives another", he explains.
The writer also highlights that the criminals portrayed do not receive money for the productions, contrary to what is speculated on social media. The scripts are based on the case records, and not on new testimonies or reports from those involved. After all, these are dramatized films and series, with actors playing the criminals, and not interviews, as would occur in a documentary.
The author says, however, that he has been paying more and more attention to the scenes of violence he writes, to ask himself the reasons behind it.
"There is a part of society that doesn't like stories of violence, and that's okay, no one is forced to like it. And there are people who like it, but not in place of the fetish of violence. This is an important evolution: violence is not gratuitous, but serves the story and provokes the reader or spectator."
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