You Are Here with Me

In a shuttered mansion near Valencia, a solitary writer is found dead. Inspector Néstor Páramo expects a routine inquiry. But the house, with its maze of staircases and rooms surrendered to darkness, shelters a history that no police report can fully explain.

For years, its owner has lived among books and the remnants of a dwindling family fortune, devoting himself to eighteenth-century Spanish literature while refusing almost every encounter with the world outside. His seclusion conceals a terrifying conviction: those who wound him are visited by death. The old servant who has known him since childhood calls the force that follows him the Black Angel. He has spent his life trying to escape it—and wondering whether escape is possible.

Then Lizavetta Voronin arrives to work in the house. Young, Russian, and unwilling to surrender to his superstition, she brings daylight into rooms where it has long been excluded. Her presence awakens a tenderness he can scarcely acknowledge, along with the fear that anyone who comes close to him may be placed in danger. As his attachment deepens, the meaning of protection becomes increasingly uncertain.

Moving between Páramo’s investigation and the writer’s inward struggle, You Are Here with Me explores how loneliness can harden into a worldview, and how affection can unsettle its foundations. Literary allusions, mordant irony, and a persistent uncertainty about the supernatural shape this intimate Gothic novel by J. A. Puig. Beyond the question of how a man died lies another, more troubling one: what does it mean to remain with someone whose presence you can no longer explain?