“There’s nothing wrong with having fears. Some would say it’s crucial. The fear of never being loved? Never being desired? Feeling like your creativity and vision aren’t wanted, even in a city that seems open to everything? Rejection is a universal fear.” – Christian Baines, Andalusia Dogs
SET in Madrid during the early 1980s, when Spain was shedding the last remnants of dictatorship and beginning to breathe with a new, albeit chaotic freedom, Christian Baines’ Andalusia Dogs immerses readers in a world pulsing with artistic rebellion, sensuality, and transformation. It’s a setting tailor-made for Baines’ distinctive voice, blending sensual, lyrical writing with an authentic understanding of queer experiences.
Andalusia Dogs, part of the Own-Voices multi-author series, Haunted Hearts: Season of the Witch, is more than a great work of historical fiction with a queer perspective; it serves as an act of cultural revival that embraces queer expression. Baines vividly captures Madrid’s post-Franco renaissance, known as the Movida Madrileña, with such vibrant detail that the city itself feels alive. Every street, theatre, and nightclub pulses with the promise of reinvention.
Through Alex, a true artistic soul yearning to create something meaningful, the reader navigates the intersections of ambition, love, and identity, stepping into a fascinating world of underground theatre, dance, and music. These scenes are more than colourful settings; they are visual acts of defiance, where art becomes both a means of survival and a way to reclaim identity and self-expression, often in queer context.
What gives the novel its particular queer resonance is the authenticity of Baines’ own-voice perspective. His handling of queer identity—specifically gay and bisexual, here—feels both understood and lived-in rather than observed, capturing the contradictions, humour, boldness, and quiet moments that mark genuine experience.
Here, Baines writes queer lives not as spectacles but as the natural, beating heart of a story about artistic creation and belonging, whether among a scene, a tight-knit group of friends, or even romantic/sexual relationships. His characters are never caricatures of suffering or rebellion, queer or not; they are complex, flawed artists trying to make meaning in a time when purpose and direction, both personally and socially, are in flux.
This authenticity ties Andalusia Dogs beautifully to Baines’ earlier Haunted Hearts novel, Geist Fleisch. [Go read my review of this novel in an earlier BLOG post.] While Geist Fleisch explores pre–World War II Berlin, that intoxicating, precarious world of cabaret, politics, and queerness, Andalusia Dogs feels like its spiritual successor. Both novels depict societies standing on the edge of profound transformation, for better or worse, where creativity thrives in defiance of repression and threat.
Baines is adept at drawing parallels between these eras. Berlin’s smoke-filled cabarets echo through Madrid’s experimental theatres and underground clubs; both are crucibles of queer expression and artistic transgression. The lineage is unmistakable—a historical continuity of marginalized voices refusing to be silenced.
Make no mistake, Andalusia Dogs stands firmly on its own. Where Geist Fleisch examined the tension between decadence and destruction, this novel delves into rebirth and reclamation. The post-dictatorship context gives its art scene a distinctly hopeful, if still volatile, energy. There’s joy in its chaos; it’s a sense that something new can be built from the ruins of political and social repression. The characters’ performances, rehearsals, and nightly escapades hum with creative urgency, and Baines writes these scenes with the eye of someone who knows how bodies move onstage and how hearts move off it— well, bodies off-stage, too, if you get my meaning.
Central to that movement is Jago, the novel’s most enigmatic figure. He is a mystery, a lover, and a muse—a character defined by contradiction. Baines constructs Jago as a study in dualism: alluring yet unknowable, both catalyst and consequence. Through Alex’s eyes, Jago becomes the personification of art’s intoxicating power: beautiful, dangerous, transformative, and, ultimately, impossible to contain. The layers of secrecy surrounding him give the novel its psychological and supernatural depth. Just as the city thrums with a tension between repression and release, Jago embodies the same dual energy; he is a man shaped by the need to bewitch, create, hide, and endure.
As the story unfolds, the boundaries between performance and reality blur, and Baines uses this uncertainty masterfully. The reader is never quite sure where Jago’s truth begins or ends, nor how much of Alex’s perception is coloured by desire and projection. This narrative tension builds toward a twist that is both devastating and illuminating.
Without revealing specifics, it’s safe to say that the final revelations reframe much of what came before. I was genuinely unprepared for the ending, and its suddenness and emotional precision left me both unsettled and quite intrigued. It’s in that final act that Baines’ horror element truly emerges, in the traditional sense and the horror of self-deception, of art consuming life and vice versa. There’s a lot to experience and unpack here. Again, I did not see this twist, this paranormal element of the novel, coming. Bravo.
In Andalusia Dogs, Baines once again showcases his skill in creating mood, atmosphere, and emotional depth. His prose is rich yet disciplined, expressive without ever feeling excessive or weighed down by flowery language. Now, as a reader and a writer, I love evocative prose, and I’ve found that Baines’ writing always finds that perfect line between deliciously palatable and too much. Sentences resonate with rhythm, much like the music and dance that live within the pages of the novel. It’s a book about the danger and necessity of creation, the cost of visibility, and the unrelenting beauty of lives lived in authenticity and defiance of silence and oppression.
Of course, nothing is ever a smooth ride, which only makes the narrative more engaging; the story is a rollercoaster of emotion and pathos! Case in point: Jago’s mysterious nature is both seductive and infuriating.
By the time the curtain falls, Andalusia Dogs has done what great fiction always should: it leaves the reader changed, haunted, and hungry for more. It’s a poignant continuation of Baines’ exploration of queer art and identity through history, and one of his most emotionally resonant works to date, in my opinion. It’s passionate, unpredictable, and utterly unforgettable.
