Hurricane Season

November 4, 2019
Melchor’s English-language debut is a furious vortex of voices that swirl around a murder in a provincial Mexican town. The story opens with a group of boys discovering the body of the Witch in a canal. The Witch is a local legend: she provides the women of the town with cures and spells, while for the men she hosts wild, orgiastic parties at her house. Each chapter is a single, cascading paragraph and follows a different townsperson. First is Yesenia, a young woman who despises her addict cousin, Luismi, and one day sees him carrying the Witch from her home with another boy, Brando. Next is Munra, Luismi’s stepfather, who was also present at the Witch’s house; then Norma, a girl who flees her abusive stepfather and ends up briefly settling with Luismi; and lastly Brando, who finally reveals the details of the Witch’s death. The murder mystery (complete with a mythical locked room in the Witch’s house) is simply a springboard for Melchor to burrow into her characters’ heads: their resentments, secrets, and hidden and not-so-hidden desires. Forceful, frenzied, violent, and uncompromising, Melchor’s depiction of a town ogling its own destruction is a powder keg that ignites on the first page and sustains its intense, explosive heat until its final sentence.

January 15, 2020
A dead Witch in a Mexican village prompts a host of locals to share rumors and memories of her checkered life and violent death. Mexican writer Melchor's first book published in English is remarkable for the sheer force of its language. Its eight chapters are each one paragraph long, and they're usually very long paragraphs, often constructed of page- or pages-long sentences. The format gives the impression that we're occupying the space of a host of characters who'll brook no interruption, even if their storytelling is lurid, digressive, and/or unreliable. But all agree that a bad thing has happened: The corpse of a local Witch who trades in "curses and cures" has been discovered floating in an irrigation canal, "seething under a myriad of black snakes." The chapters that follow attempt to fill out the backstory: She allegedly killed her husband and cursed his sons, hexed relationships over money, might actually be a man, delivered abortions, and provided a druggy and boozy safe haven for young gay men. What's true or not matters less than the Witch's role as the village scapegoat, the person upon whom everyone places their shames and secrets. Two virtuoso chapters underscore the depth of feeling and disquieting intensity Melchor is capable of, one turning on a girl impregnated by her stepfather and the blame and embarrassment rained upon her, the other about a closeted young man in a Bosch-ian milieu that takes byways into drugs, violence, and bestiality porn. It's tough stuff but not gratuitously so: The narrative moves so fast the slurs and gross-outs feel less like attempts to shock and more like the infrastructure of a place built on rage and transgression. The place is suffused with "bad vibes, jinxes...bleakness." Whether the Witch was its creator or firewall is an open question. Messy yet engrossingly feverish. Melchor has deep reserves of talent and nerve.

COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

April 17, 2020

Five boys discover the badly decomposed body of the Witch in an irrigation ditch near a small Mexican town, and we eventually ascertain that the perpetrators of her murder mistakenly believed she possessed a cache of coins and jewels that would finance their escape to Cancun to establish a new life. But though this is ostensibly a murder mystery, Melchor eschews straightforward narration and instead develops several parallel narratives focusing on the townspeople whose lives were affected by the victim, with all the story lines converging at the end. From the sewers of humanity, these deprived inhabitants lead lives of squalor involving drugs, booze, and gay and straight sex; readers may come away uncertain whether to pity or to despise them. Each lengthy chapter (one tops out at 62 pages) is one long paragraph with serpentine sentences that sweep along like a nonstop whirlwind, gradually bringing the reader closer to the motivations of the characters and to the solution of the crime. VERDICT Melchor's English-language debut made the cut for the Booker International 2020 long list and employs a creative storytelling technique, but readers must be forewarned that its vulgar, raunchy language is not for the linguistically squeamish.--Lawrence Olszewski, North Central State Coll., Mansfield, OH

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.