It is in the understanding of culture in connection with history that I would like to interpret what follows the appearance and main characteristics of the black novel in Spain during the second half of the 1970s and the 1980s. I intend to place it as a cultural phenomenon defined by other phenomena, national and supranational, in various fields: cultural, economic, political, social and philosophical. The specific authors and authors will be examples here, with no time to work on the textual and extrattual complexity of any of them. Given, as I have said, the transitional nature, of historical openness, which underpins the onset of the phenomenon of the black novel, I will work with the concepts of break and continuity to better and more complex understand its historical location.