Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor
Synopsis
"The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse—by a group of children playing near the irrigation canals—propels the whole village into an investigation of how and why this murder occurred. Rumors and suspicions spread. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering on new details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters that most would write off as utterly irredeemable, forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village.
Like Roberto Bolano’s 2666 or Faulkner’s greatest novels, Hurricane Season takes place in a world filled with mythology and violence—real violence, the kind that seeps into the soil, poisoning everything around: it’s a world that becomes more terrifying and more terrifyingly real the deeper you explore it."
My Thoughts
I will not be rating this book, since it fell so far outside of my comfort zone that I don’t know that I can reliably rate it. I debated not posting a review at all, however this book was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2020 — and I read it because it was part of a book club and it has really great reviews on Goodreads, and none of that adequately prepared me for this book. Part of my goal in my reviews is to give content warnings as accurately as possible to people, since adding these warnings to the beginning of books is not common practice yet. I tend to go into most of the books I read as blind as possible to the overall story. I have never regretted this habit of mine more than when reading this book. I’ve included content warnings below as usual, but I feel in this case the content warnings may need content warnings. So the full list is below, but I’ll be honest, I can’t think of a warning that is NOT on the list for this one. So, as always, take care of yourself friends.
Reading through others’ reviews, I saw the term “misery porn” used a lot and I could not agree more. While I’m not here to tell anyone what they should and should not write about, I did not see what goal this book was supposed to accomplish. I don’t think that having 200 pages of everything and everyone is disgustingly awful and there is no hope, is helpful. Many may disagree with me on this. But my main issue was not with the fact that the author chose to write about some truly terrible things, it’s that she chose to write it in a way that throws a bunch of awful stuff at you without sitting with and analyzing the nuance of any of it. It’s just a string of one awful thing after another and there doesn’t seem to be a satisfying reason why any of it is happening.
There was a pretty intriguing murder storyline that I wanted to know how it was solved. That was the single thread that kept me going through this book. Every chapter is told from the perspective of a different character in some way involved. It was an intriguing premise but I felt completely held hostage in the truly terrible world these characters existed in. Every chapter is like a run-on sentence and the imagery is vile.
Overall, I can not say I recommend this one. If you're intrigued and would like to know more, message me, and let's discuss it.
Genre: contemporary, horror (non-supernatural), Mexican literature, translation
Representation: Mexican, trans, gay
Content Warnings: femicide, r-slur, slut-shaming, rape, abortion, abuse (physical & mental), miscarriage, murder, mentions of suicide/suicidal ideation, sexual assault of minors (grooming, rape), torture of a prisoner, homophobic slurs, transphobic slurs, bestiality, internalized homophobia