«Lord, Savior of my soul, where have you led me? Here I am, in the tower of the damned, convicted murderer, and tomorrow, at dawn, I will be taken to the gallows and hanged! For whoever kills a fellow man must be put to death; this is the law of God and of man."
In 1680, the remote monastery of Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps was the scene of the ill-fated love between Ambrose, a young Franciscan, and Benedicta, the daughter of an executioner. Two centuries later, Ambrose Bierce interpreted the sinister details of the legend until it became his only novel and one of the pinnacles of Gothic literature, in which faith, desire, guilt and redemption are mixed.

The story of The Monk and the Executioner's Daughter begins with the arrival of the young Franciscan who, horrified by the way the locals treat the girl because of her father's occupation, begins a fight to protect her under the pretext of Christian charity. However, little by little and without realizing it, he will fall into a fatal attraction from which he will try to escape.

The admirable suspense of these pages runs through alpine landscapes of an abrupt and gloomy nature, which influence both the story and the protagonists themselves, impregnated with a morbid aura that snatches their senses and leads them towards the lowest passions. This atmosphere of terror is enhanced by Santiago Caruso's sgraffito, which plunges into this story of forbidden love, destruction and tragedy. «To say that the conflict is focused on the struggle between Love and Mission would be to generate a worn-out déjà vu. I conceive it as a battle between Nature and Religion. So I thought of painting the animal and the vegetable invading the perception of the morality of the world of Man and God”, explains the Argentine illustrator.