Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor

Shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize Now in paperback, Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season is “a bilious, profane, blood-spattered tempest of rage” (The Wall Street Journal), that casts “a powerful spell” (NPR): “a narrative that not only decries an atrocity but embodies the beauty and vitality it perverts” (The New York Times) The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse has the whole village investigating the murder. 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—inners whom most people would write off as irredeemable—forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village. Like Roberto Bolano’s 2666 or Faulkner’s novels, Hurricane Season takes place in a world saturated with mythology and violence—real violence, the kind that seeps into the soil, poisoning everything around: it’s a world that becomes more and more terrifying the deeper you explore it.

Wanton violence
treasure is just an excuse
killing excites them.

This book will stick with me for a long time. I got half way and I was like “how am I going to write a review for this?!” This could honestly be considered horror, true gut wrenching horror. This book is depraved, disgusting, disturbing, but most importantly, human. The author gives you in depth thoughts from these monsters of man but somehow deep down in all the tar and gunk there is a twinkle of humanity. Not enough to feel sorry for them but enough to see they are just people and not some supernatural poltergeist. Which to me made this even more terrifying.

This is not an easy book to recommend, I personally jumped in blind from a YouTuber's list of disturbing books. The fact that this book doesn't have a formal trigger warning page is kinda insane. I knew it was going to be rough, but this? Are you okay Melchor? Is the translator okay? Are any of us okay?

“The rain can't hurt you now, and the darkness doesn't last forever.”

This book is a lot of things, none of which are easy.

The first thing I noticed was there were no paragraph breaks. Just... none. The only reprieve the reader gets is when a new chapter starts and there are only a handful of them. Even the sentences snake on for pages at a time, refusing to let the reader take a breath.

It's all intentional and while grating at first, pushing through it unlocks something a lot deeper in this book. Just like Cormac McCarthy writes with sparse punctuation and refuses to use quotation marks for his dialogue, this book trudges forward using punctuation, or the lack thereof, as a bludgeon.

Because this book is brutal. If I had to guess, I'd say that Fernanda Melchor wrote this book angry, and I don't blame her at all. It's a book about poverty. Not about the kind of poverty a lot of books released in the US are about, but agonizing, inescapable poverty punctuated by constant violence. The publishing industry is so filled with books written by those of privilege and wealth that it's refreshing to not read a book about a well-off New Yorker sometimes.

The central premise of the book is that there's a witch in town. She provides a variety of services for the local women, most of which we learn about later on in the book. In a world where the only way to make money and support their family for most of these women is for prostitution, there aren't exactly women's health clinics around, if you catch my drift. This ‘witch' can help, along with other ailments as well.

The story unfolds from the perspective of a few characters, each in their own chapter, all based on the brutal murder of the witch by a few local boys. The reason for the murder unfolds when the reader is taken closer to the act itself by inhabiting the POV of the men responsible, each with a different understanding and reason for being in that van that pulled up to her house that evening.

Let's just say that extreme poverty, exploration of sexuality and the relationship between cycles of abuse, poverty, corruption, and homosexuality all end up tangled in the same web, eventually.

The conscious decision to write the book in this manner gives it a sense of movement, like a makeshift go cart wheeled up to the top of the hill, allowing you to jump in while it's in free fall, forcing you to be along for the ride with no real sense of control. You're just along for the ride, unable to look away from the horror of those rocks at the bottom of the hill.

Just beautiful.