[...] Imitators of the Boom were (and are) legion, but Bolano and others of his generation tended to see them as selling an exotic stereotype -- dictators, whores, patriarchs, and ghosts -- for export only. The situation in Latin America had changed. The dictators, for the most part, were gone. Capitalism, the World Bank, and the international drug trade replaced caudillos, death squads, and political persecution as the new faces of evil. The phantasms and terrors of the Boom generation had mutated into something more diffuse, unmoored from the local.