A notorious witch’s dead body is discovered in a river by a group of boys in a small Mexican town. The tentacle-like arms of Fernanda Melchor’s narrative grow from this opening scene and slither through the lives of the townspeople, revealing the historical, the recent past, and nothing at all. On one level, Hurricane Season is an unraveling of the events prior to the corpse’s discovery and how she came to die; but more than that, Hurricane Season is an odyssey of all that one cannot know, and the truths that lurk unseen among the grim daily lives of the impoverished people in the town of La Matosa. One could categorize this novel a mystery, but the revelations within render the questions of ‘who did it?’ and ‘why?’ banal.

Most of the 13 chapters are long and follow a character connected to the witch. The original witch: her mother. The rumors and mudslides and deaths and curses that created the witch as she was known before her death. Yesenia, who encounters her cousin Luisma one morning with blood all over his hands and face. Brando, a boy that Luisma galivants around town with, drinking, doing drugs and much more detailed sordid activities. Luisma’s stepfather who escaped a hospital after a bad car accident because:

“The doctors told him they were going to cut it off, and he said no, no fucking way, he didn’t give a shit if it was bent or missing bits of bone, it was his leg and no one was lopping it off and the doctors said nope, no can do, that leg was as good as gone and, besides, the risk of infection was too high, but Munra dug his heels in and with Chabela’s help he escaped from the hospital the day before they were due to hack it off, and in the end made those quack cunts eat their words because his leg never did get infected and it just wound up a little wedged out of place, right?”

That’s one of the book’s shortest sentences. The novel continues on a relentless trajectory of endless sentences—some last more than thirty pages—and it makes the reader feel out of breath and like you can’t put the book down because there is no natural stop and you really, actually, very much want to put the book down because there is a lot of vile shit that’s happening, oh and everyone’s using words like ‘cunt’ and ‘fuck’ and perhaps you shouldn’t read this in bed next to a partner who is sleeping sweetly because there was that one moment where you uttered ‘fuck’ and he stirred, and then you knew you had to put the book down for the night, but those weird dreams started coming so you had to turn the light on again, especially toward the end of the book when it all devolves more and the actions that lead to the death of the witch—a character you somehow know less about at the end of the book than the beginning—start making you feel sick, particularly Norma’s chapter, but then it gets even worse in Brando’s, of course a dog is brought into it, and then the grime starts to suffocate you even when you’re not reading it and perhaps this isn’t a healthy book, but my god it’s a thing of beauty.

Read the rest of the review at thebookslut.com <3