La parodia, el humor negro y lo grotesco como recursos narrativos en los cuentos de Julián Herbert y Carlos Velázquez.

This article analyzes parody, dark humor, and the grotesque as narrative resources in two short-story collections emblematic of the so-called literature of northern Mexico: Julián Herbert’s Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino (2017) and Carlos Velázquez’s Chicken-Fried Clerk (2019). It examines humor as a procedure of exaggeration and distortion— a “funhouse mirror” that enables critical distance from one’s own reflections— and as a mean to unsettle certainties, reshape the textures of the real, and interrogate violence as a cultural horizon. Within this framework, humor also functions as a defense against the overwhelming force of social critique: a bitter laughter that sows doubt and acts as a distorting echo of what seeks to impose itself as singular and linear. The article further argues that parody and the grotesque operate not merely as postmodern aesthetic strategies but as critical dispositifs capable of disrupting necropolitical spectacularization (Mbembe) by staging, in a grotesque key, the narrative produced by the necromachine (Reguillo). In doing so, it shifts the debate from spectacular “narco-narratives” toward a poetic of the symbolic deactivation of terror.