Adelaida García Morales already had ghosts in mind when she wrote El Sur, seguido de Bene. In addition to the gypsy ghost of Bene, the author referred to the dead addressees as ghosts and went on to explain that ‘de esta manera se hace presente, es algo que va más allá del recuerdo, es hacer que el personaje muerto casi vuelva a aparecer’ [in this way the dead character makes himself or herself present, it's something that goes beyond recollection, it's making him or her almost re-appear.] However, that casi [almost] is significant and the removal of it marks a significant change in approach to be found in Las mujeres de Héctor [Héctor's Women]. Now she moves onto a different type of Gothic terrain, away from the treatment of the supernatural used hitherto whereby the reader was allowed a relatively free choice of whether to accept it at face value and suspend disbelief or to prefer a common-sense interpretation of events. In this text the paranormal is not ultimately going to be rationally explicable. By reversing the Radcliffean approach of making the supernatural seemingly irrefutable in the first instance, and then eventually explaining it away in this novel, the author appears to be leaving open – indeed, encouraging – the possibility of a realist explanation for most of the novel and then she snatches that option away from the reader at the very end. In this respect, the novel conforms to Julia Briggs's definition of a ghost story (as opposed to a story that merely happens to contain one or more ghosts): ‘The ghost story's “explanations” do not operate to rationalize or demystify the supernatural events, but rather to set them inside a kind of imaginative logic.’ She goes on to observe that this logic is often based on revenge, glossed as ‘the instinct to inflict upon others the pain we have received’, which seems to fit the implied reasons for the central haunting of this narrative.

The novel uses third-person omniscient narration to recount how Laura, ex-wife of the eponymous Héctor, accidentally kills a certain Delia, friend of his mistress, Margarita, when on the first page of the novel she hits out at her in a temper and repeatedly bangs her head against a wall.