"Mexican writer Fernanda Melchor's subject is the inner life of misogynist violence—for both perpetrators and victims—and the collective mythmaking that sanctions such crimes or makes them disappear... The novel is a Gulf Coast noir from four characters’ perspectives, each circling the murder more closely than the last. All share a connection to the central suspect, Luismi, a dreamy, drug-addled ex-lover of the Witch — who, it turns out, is not some dreadful creature but a trans woman who practices traditional medicine and throws clandestine parties. Their relationship serves as a Rorschach test for Melchor’s narrators, whose actions reveal not only the details of the crime but the fears, resentments and unacknowledged lusts that condense around it like a distorting mist....She creates a narrative that not only decries an atrocity but embodies the beauty and vitality it perverts. Impressive."
The New York Times - Julian Lucas
"A bravura performance, teeming with life and fury. Melchor takes a single, brutal act and explodes it, giving voice to the legacies of tragedy and violence within, and daring us to look away."
"Written with pain and enormous skill, in a rhythm at once tearing and hypnotic, Hurricane Season is an account of the wreckage of a forsaken Mexico governed by nightmarish jungle law. An important, brave novel by a writer of extraordinary talent, magnificently translated by Sophie Hughes."
"Hurricane Season is, first and foremost, a horror story—its horror coming from rather than contrasting with the lyricism of Melchor’s prose. Instead of supplying a welcome breeze in the heat, the local river is where the children find the Witch’s body. Sophie Hughes’s translation renders the expansive, punishing spirit of Mexican slang impressively."
New York Review of Books - Emmanuel Ordóñez Angulo
"Hurricane Season is an intense and hypnotic literary experience, where physical violence and the hostility of the landscape form a microcosm of helplessness. Fernanda Melchor's narrative maturity is powerful: a book that leaves you shaken."
"Hurricane Season is an unrelenting torrent of violence, barbarity, recrimination, sex, greed, trauma, corruption, neglect, fear, lust, deceit, baseness, and the insidiousness of evil. The young Mexican author writes with unflinching ferocity and her propulsive prose is simultaneously scintillating and suffocating. Hurricane Season brings to mind other darkly delirious works of (semi)fiction like Rafael Chirbes' On the Edge , Bolaño's 2666 , or even the novels of Santiago Gamboa. Inspired by a story Melchor encountered in a local newspaper, Hurricane Season offers a testimonial of our increasingly depraved age of disconnection and disposability. A remarkable, indelible work of art."
"Intertwined voices spiral around the mysterious murder of The Witch in an isolated tropical town, revealing its depravities, secrets, family tragedies, violence, accumulating into a narrative hurricane that howls and devastates but also subsides into renewed light. Hurricane Season —a dark fable that captures the horrors and despair of contemporary Mexico as no other novel has—is already widely regarded as a contemporary Mexican classic."
"Brutal, relentless, beautiful, fugal, Hurricane Season explores the violent mythologies of one Mexican village and reveals how they touch the global circuitry of capitalist greed. This is an inquiry into the sexual terrorism and terror of broken men. This is a work of both mystery and critique. Most recent fiction seems anemic by comparison."
"Hurricane Season is a potent brew, an incantatory simmer of violence, sin, and envy, a thick, salty, blood-dark drink. Melchor dares her read to peer right into the story's roiling heart as she peels back village lusts and jealousies layer by layer, excavating a monstrous turbulence dwelling beneath, grotesque and darkly beguiling."
…impressive…Melchor investigates the deep complicity between fairy tale and "femicide," a term adopted by Mexican feminists to reckon with the systemic, accelerating and increasingly sadistic murders of women and girls in their country…But Melchor isn't out to write a protest novel or to offer readers highbrow snuff. Her subject is the inner life of misogynist violencefor both perpetrators and victimsand the collective mythmaking that sanctions such crimes or makes them disappear…Melchor has an exceptional gift for ventriloquism, as does her translator, Sophie Hughes, who skillfully meets the challenge posed by a novel so rich in idiosyncratic voices…Melchor creates a narrative that not only decries an atrocity but embodies the beauty and vitality it perverts.
The New York Times Book Review - Julian Lucas
11/04/2019
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. (Mar.)
"Fernanda Melchor's Hurricane Season is so strange, wild, and foul-mouthed that I almost missed the sharp critiques embedded in the story. A mix of drugs, sex, mythology, small-town desperation, poverty, and superstition, this novel spreads like a fungus from the dark center of the literary space where crime fiction and horror meet. Melchor is the witch and this novel is a powerful spell."
In 'Hurricane Season,' Words Swirl Wild And Dark - NPR - Gabino Iglesias
"One of Mexico’s most promising and prominent writers—Melchor writes of lives with specificity, with a crude recognition of their humanity that allows, if not for redemption or hope for those lives, at least some measure of peace for their dead. Virtuosic prose."
Season of the Witch - Bookforum - Ana Cecilia
"A brutal portrait of small-town claustrophobia, in which machismo is a prison and corruption isn’t just institutional but domestic, with families broken by incest and violence. Melchor’s long, snaking sentences make the book almost literally unputdownable, shifting our grasp of key events by continually creeping up on them from new angles. A formidable debut."
The Guardian - Anthony Cummins
"Stomach-churning, molar-grinding, nightmare-inducing, and extraordinarily clear-eyed account of the ordinary horrors men inflict upon women. Melchor refuses to look away, refuses to indulge in fantasy or levity—even in the moments when the novel is laugh-out-loud funny. And lest the far-off reader think the horror is contained to the lives of others, Melchor repeatedly threads the reminders of the long reach of these crimes—and their causes—throughout the narrative."
The Nation - Lucas Iberico Lozada
"Hurricane Season condemns violence — especially sexual violence — by depicting it unflinchingly, in scenes and language that make Truman Capote and Cormac McCarthy seem tame. This is a novel that sinks like lead to the bottom of the soul and remains there, its images full of color, its characters alive and raging against their fate."
A Terrible Beauty: On Fernanda Melchor’s “Hurricane Season” - Los Angeles Review of Book - Amanda Dennis
"Fernanda Melchor is part of a wave of real writing, a multi-tongue, variform, generationless, decadeless, ageless wave, that American contemporary literature must ignore if it is to hold on to its infantile worldview."
"This is the Mexico of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian or Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, where the extremes of evil create a pummeling, hyper-realistic effect. But the 'elemental cry; of Ms. Melchor’s writing voice, a composite of anger and anguish, is entirely her own. "
Fiction: Of Illness and Miracle - Wall Street Journal - Sam Sacks
"Propelled by a violent lyricism and stunning immediacy, Hurricane Season maps out a landscape in which social corrosion acquires a mythical shape. This masterful portrayal of contemporary Mexico, so vertiginous and bewitching it pulls you into its spiritual abyss from the opening page, is brilliantly rendered into English by Sophie Hughes. Fernanda Melchor is a remarkable talent."
"Hurricane Season is a hell of a force to be reckoned with."
"Hurricane Season is an intense and hypnotic literary experience, where physical violence and the hostility of the landscape for a microcosm of helplessness. Fernanda Melchor's narrative maturity is powerful: a book that leaves you shaken."
"Her sentences are sloping hills; her paragraphs, whole mountains. It’s no wonder that Melchor was dubbed a sort of south-of-the-border Faulkner for her baroque and often brutally harrowing tale of poverty, paranoia and murder (also: witches, or at least the idea of them) in a fictional Mexican village. "
The New York Times - "The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century"
"A dazzling novel and the English-language debut of one of Mexico’s most exciting new voices."
The Guardian - Marta Bausells
"Hurricane Season remains a powerful experience for the way its cruelty becomes, improbably, and before our eyes, a form of radically intransigent egalitarianism."
"Melchor wields a sentence like a saber. She never flinches in the bold, precise strokes of Hurricane Season. In prose as precise and breathtaking as it is unsettling, Melchor has crafted an unprecedented novel about femicide in Mexico and how poverty and extreme power imbalances lead to violence everywhere."
"Fernanda Melchor has a powerful voice, and by powerful I mean unsparing, devastating, the voice of someone who writes with rage, and has the skill to pull it off."
‘Brutal, relentless, beautiful, fugal, Hurricane Season explores the violent mythologies of one Mexican village and reveals how they touch the global circuitry of capitalist greed. This is an inquiry into the sexual terrorism and terror of broken men. This is a work of both mystery and critique. Most recent fiction seems anaemic by comparison. — Ben Lerner, author of The Topeka School
‘Fernanda Melchor has a powerful voice, and by powerful I mean unsparing, devastating, the voice of someone who writes with rage, and has the skill to pull it off.’ — Samanta Schweblin, author of Fever Dream
‘This is the Mexico of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian or Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 , where the extremes of evil create a pummeling, hyper-realistic effect. But the “elemental cry” of Ms. Melchor’s writing voice, a composite of anger and anguish, is entirely her own.’ — Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
‘A brutal portrait of small-town claustrophobia, in which machismo is a prison and corruption isn’t just institutional but domestic, with families broken by incest and violence. Melchor’s long, snaking sentences make the book almost literally unputdownable, shifting our grasp of key events by continually creeping up on them from new angles. A formidable debut.’ — Anthony Cummins, Observer
‘Hurricane Season is a Gulf Coast noir from four characters’ perspectives, each circling a murder more closely than the last. Melchor has an exceptional gift for ventriloquism, as does her translator, Sophie Hughes, who skillfully meets the challenge posed by a novel so rich in idiosyncratic voices. Melchor evokes the stories of Flannery O’Connor, or, more recently, Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings . Impressive.’ — Julian Lucas, The New York Times
‘Stomach-churning, molar-grinding, nightmare-inducing, and extraordinarily clear-eyed account of the ordinary horrors men inflict upon women. Melchor refuses to look away, refuses to indulge in fantasy or levity—even in the moments when the novel is laugh-out-loud funny. And lest the far-off reader think the horror is contained to the lives of others, Melchor repeatedly threads the reminders of the long reach of these crimes—and their causes—throughout the narrative.’ — Lucas Iberico Lozada, The Nation
‘I found it impossible to look away. Hurricane Season unfurls with the pressure and propulsion of an unforeseen natural disaster, the full force of Melchor’s arresting voice captured in Sophie Hughes’ masterful translation.’ — Lucy Scholes, Financial Times
‘A sprawling, heaving thing, and I loved it because I have no idea how Fernanda Melchor was able to write it. The prose has the quality of a storm. — Avni Doshi, Guardian Best Books of 2020
‘Hurricane Season is, first and foremost, a horror story—its horror coming from rather than contrasting with the lyricism of Melchor’s prose [...] Melchor’s kaleidoscope keeps circling around the untold source of the horrors, and we are increasingly keen to unveil it. This is an effect of the structure of the novel as much as of its writing. Sophie Hughes’s translation renders the expansive, punishing spirit of Mexican slang so impressively that one wonders whether the harsher sounds of English in fact suit the novel better.’ — Emmanuel Ordóñez Angulo, New York Review of Books
04/17/2020
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
2019-12-23 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.