Analyzing three examples, En salvaje compañía (1994), El lápiz del carpintero (1998), and Los libros arden mal (2006), this contribution seeks to determine the function of the fantastic as a mode to tell about traumatic events like the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship within a context of cultural memory in Manuel Rivas' novels. The main hypothesis is that the 'real maravilloso gallego' offers a particularly apt structure to talk about the Civil War by conferring the dead a space of action within fiction.