False Alarm is a concise, “flat” story that hides a layer of sophistication behind its seemingly simple facade. It draws from the genre of fantastic hyperbole, a form of the Latin-American fantastic (Garcia Marquez being it’s foremost representative), which takes a situation or an ordinary event and stretches it beyond the limits of reality (like rain that will not subside for four years). Hernandez stops just at the brink; the events are dramatic and exaggerated, but do not slide over into the fantastic, thus managing to infuse the plot, which starts off as banal, with suspense and dark humor.
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