While the mystery of who committed the murder is central to the narrative, the majesty of HS is its depiction of a town ravaged by the oil and the drugs industry. One by one we’re introduced to a handful of characters whose lives intersected with her each breathlessly depraved tale reveals a bit more about the protagonist, the witch and the dystopia that is La Matosa. Set in the fictional Mexican town of ‘La Matosa’ the story centres on the brutal murder of a ‘witch’ who hosted drug orgies for local youths, provided abortions for sex workers and was rumoured to have a stash of gold in her decrepit home. A killer cocktail of violence, corruption and squalor with a hefty dose of superstition, this one left me reeling.
Both deal with entrapment: TDOE explores the turmoil of a guilt-ridden child stuck in a remote farmhouse but HS is bigger and bolder with its spotlight on a community of people struggling to survive social deprivation.
Now, far be it from me to contradict the IBP judges but Hurricane Season is the better book and considerably so. Shortlisted for the 2020 Int Booker Prize, Hurricane Season lost out toThe Discomfort of Evenings - memorably the most revolting book I’ve read. 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. 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. 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. Winner of the Internationaler Literaturpreis The English-language debut of one of the most thrilling and accomplished young Mexican writers
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