Brazilian novelist, musician and screenwriter Ana Paula Maia’s On Earth As It Is Beneath is a tale of survival in a penal colony on the brink of collapse whose warden is determined to inflict ever-increasing forms of horror on inmates. On land where enslaved people were once tortured and murdered, the state built a penal colony in the wilderness, where inmates could be rehabilitated, but never escape. Now, decades later, and having only succeeded in trapping men, not changing them for the better, its operations are winding down. But in the prison’s waning days, a new horror is unleashed: every full-moon night, the inmates are released, the warden is armed with rifles, and the hunt begins. Every man plans his escape, not knowing if his end will come at the hands of a familiar face, or from the unknown dangers beyond the prison walls. Ana Paula Maia delivers a bracing vision of our potential for violence, and our collective failure to account for consequences of our social and political action, or inaction. Although no crime is committed out of view for his novelist, and her raw, brutal power enlists us all as witness.On Earth As It Is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia, Translated by Padma Vishwanathan, Charco Press, £20/$27, 112 pages.