For a novel that contains only a young boy, an old man and a herd of goats, Out in the Open manages to convey a fear that seeps off the page and into the consciousness. Author Jesús Carrasco is as sparse with details in this novel as is the tortured landscape he creates. In an unnamed country at an unknown time, the boy has run away from his village and is being hunted. He meets the elderly goatherd, a man who speaks little, but indicates the boy can join him as he journeys from village to village selling the goats’ milk. In this way he can try and get north to a better life.

Why this boy would become the subject of a hunt is not clear initially. What is, is that drought has decimated the land and left behind, in the dust, the lawlessness of power and violence. The goatherd and boy have nothing more to eat than nuts, raisins, bread, and cheese. Water is their most precious resource, finding it their largest occupation, simple survival their only goal. As the pursuit intensifies, we learn that the boy is a toy for the bailiff and is highly prized enough that the man will stop at nothing to find him. At each step in Out in the Open Carrasco uses the fewest words possible to wring out the largest of human emotions—fear, anger, kindness.

Out in the Open is not a novel of grand devices and wildly imaginative dystopian images. There is no futuristic element in the deprivation and brutality of the characters’ lives. Instead, with prose that is as spare as the land around them, Carrasco gives the reader everything they need to feel the sickly terror the boy feels at being captured and returned to his former life. Reality is the dystopia.