To get an idea of Salvadoran novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya, you can simply read the titles of his books: She-Devil in the Mirror, The Great Masturbator, The Well in My Chest. These titles imply isolation, self-struggle, and intense inner turmoil that's more than a little grotesque — all of which you'll find in Moya's sharp, monologic novels.

If personal struggle is Moya's great interest as a writer, it's probably because he's no stranger to it. Moya counts as his first memory the explosion of a leftist radical's bomb on his grandparents' porch. As he has written, the bomb went off because Moya's "grandfather was the president of a nationalist party and was conspiring to oust a liberal government." Moya later participated in the brutal, US-fanned civil war that engulfed El Salvador from 1980 to 1992, as a manager of the guerrillas' propaganda. After three years at war, however, he became disenchanted with El Salvador's leftist guerrillas — perhaps with thoughts of his grandfather in mind — and rode out the remainder of the conflict in Mexico.

And yet, after Moya returned to El Salvador and published Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in El Salvador in 1997, he found that the country could be dangerous even when at peace. Revulsion is a meditation on how the legendarily caustic Austrian misanthrope-cum-novelist (a major influence on Moya) might have condemned present-day El Salvador if given the opportunity. The bitter narrative prompted so many death threats that Moya was soon forced to decamp for Europe.

As literary controversies often are, the furor over Revulsion was off base — in Moya's words, he wrote the book primarily to "rid myself of that style [Thomas Bernhard's] that was infecting me," not to denounce a nation. It's not difficult to imagine how Moya earned the enmity of his countrymen with descriptions that, for instance, liken El Salvador's university system to a "turd expelled from the rectum of the militaries and the communists," but readers who stop at Moya's often-inflammatory statements are missing the point. Style, not message, is paramount. What's more, Moya's novels thrive on the instability of angry, self-contradictory narrators; it's hard enough figuring out what the narrator believes, much less figuring out how the narrator's statements trace back to the author. Moya himself explains that "the challenge is to enter inside the characters and become one of them, to see the world like they see it and to dispose of my thoughts and emotions just as they would dispose of theirs."

After fleeing El Salvador, Moya eventually ended up in Guatemala in 2003, and his stay there inspired his only novel that is currently available in English, Senselessness. This passionate, sexual, paranoid rant is the story of a writer gradually driven insane as he edits a 1,100-page report documenting atrocities committed during Guatemala's 36-year civil war. As with most of Moya's work, Senselessness is short overall, while its sentences are long and sinuous. It is a book that gapes in horror at the brutalities people inflict upon one another, but, at the same time, it also indicts the audience for craving art about the darkest incidents of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Moya places these thoughts on the page in the form of lengthy, clause-ridden sentences; they are so complex that to pull a few sample phrases would reveal almost nothing about the ideas they articulate. Moya's sentences run on for pages at a time, and they have a tendency to draw the reader forward like an electric current pulling a subway train, making his short, fervid novels an intense reading experience. This is an ideal format for an author whose books deal with characters struggling for their minds and souls, who wrestle their subconscious urges to a stalemate as they fight to find some measure of peace. It's also an ideal format for Moya; he is an expert at using punctuation to rein in his pullulating sentences, which, when combined with his feel for the rhythms of thought, makes his prose both engaging and easy to read.

Senselessness was translated into English by Katherine Silver and published by New Directions earlier this year. The novel has received a modest but enthusiastic reception, which is no easy task for a challenging book by a Central American writer — especially in a book market generally acknowledged as translation-phobic. New Directions has plans to publish an English translation of a second Moya book in the near future, and it seems likely that more are on the way. It doesn't hurt that late Latin American star author Roberto Bolaño was Moya's friend and a great admirer of his work, but Moya is poised to break into the mainstream on the merit of his own undeniable talent — and there are few other authors who are quite so deserving.

-Scott Esposito