Hurricane Season

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.

Reading this is like being in the eye of a hurricane. It's exhausting and full on but such a brilliant book.

One of the best novels I've read recently. The language is so disorienting and foul but at the same time is very evocative of this chaotic, drugged up, and sweaty landscape these characters live in. Also has almost every messed up thing you can think of in it and very graphic descriptions at that so not for the faint of heart.

The stream of narration pulls you along and leaves you breathless. I was captivated but also felt held captive, incapable of escaping the text's inertia and lack of periods.

A gritty portrait of a small Mexican town overrun with poverty, drugs, whores, abuse, gangs, violence. The novel circles around the murder of the local “witch” and every chapter presents a different characters life and point of view, slowly untangling the turn of events.

Relentless, and genius.

Heads up : IT'S RAW AND INTENSE!

The structure and the style of this book is interesting.
This is so intense and dirty - But it's such a page turner!!

Not the book for everyone, for sure. But definitely, the writing was powerful and clever, the way she handled the elements around the closed society!