Hurricane Season

Melchor doesn't use paragraph breaks and barely any periods, which makes for a daunting read. But once I committed I found myself flying through breathless screeds, simultaneously defensive and accusatory from the POVs of a handful of residents of a small Mexican village where a witch, who deals in everything from soothsaying to abortifacients, was found floating face down in the reservoir. This book was stunning in every sense. Like nothing I've ever read.

I’m keenly drawn to this novel because it navigates the specter between myth and violence, the grandeur of folkloric myth, and the raw side of violence, which are so descriptive of the Mexican past and present. Melchor blurs the lines between a world of quasi-fantastical superstition and hyper-realism, delving at times into the territory of mystery and crime fiction, all of it contained by the paradigm of the Mexican drug war, accurately rendering the reach and expanse of drug consumption and distribution as much as the ravages they bring about.

Centered around the figure of a murdered witch and alleged… show more.