Publishers Weekly
06/17/2024
Valencia’s accomplished debut collection portrays female characters in stark relief against unforgiving desert settings. In “The Reclamation,” a middle-aged woman attends a “self-actualization bootcamp” in the Coachella Valley. When her yurt mate disappears, she sets off on an increasingly dangerous walk across the “dried out and unwelcoming” landscape to find her. In the title story, Wendy arrives in Marfa, Tex., to supervise a marketing campaign for the reboot of a TV show only to find her efforts derailed by masses of young women devoted to an influencer who preaches “purity through chaos.” In “The White Place,” a standout entry, an unnamed artist reminiscent of Georgia O’Keeffe has an affair with a much younger ceramicist, who flatters her and her work in exchange for an introduction to her art dealer. In these stories, women are often in competition with each other; for instance, when the unnamed artist learns her lover has impregnated a 17-year-old, she exerts her influence to change the course of the younger woman’s life. Throughout, Valencia exhibits a mastery of plot and keen perception of her characters’s vulnerabilities. These alluring stories deserve a wide readership. Agent: Michelle Brower, Trellis Literary. (Aug.)
Julie Buntin
"I've loved Lena Valencia's brilliant, beguiling stories for years and read her debut collection in a single breathless evening. These are stories with teeth, both chilling and bold, about the strength and vulnerability of women and girls. Full of surprising turns, Mystery Lights reminded me of the incredible power of short fiction to speak the truth."
A Best Horror Book of 2024 Redbook
"Valencia is not afraid to dip a toe—hell, her whole foot—into the speculative uncanny. If you enjoy the work of Kelly Link or Carmen Maria Machado, you will find much satisfaction in Mystery Lights."
Reactor
"Valencia’s fiction often ventures to desert landscapes, illustrating the strange and fantastical goings-on that take place there."
Shelf Awareness
"Cinematic. . . . Using the raw, strange setting of the desert, and its uneasy proximity to the glossy grit of Hollywood, Valencia probes the dark obsessions her characters have with control and sublime spectacle."
Kelly Link
"These are stories full of menace and delight, drawing from that deep well of human complexity, perversity, sincerity, and hope. Mystery Lights is gorgeous."
Rachel Lyon
"B movie aesthetics meet the cinematic splendor of the desert in these ten clever, neatly crafted, wryly stylized short stories. Against the backdrop of their desolate and often haunted landscapes, Lena Valencia's characters vividly come to life."
A Best Horror Book of 2024 Esquire
"The American Southwest is a stage for slippage between reality and the weird, between horror and beauty, and between speculative and literary fiction…. If you enjoy the work of Kelly Link or Carmen Maria Machado, you will find much satisfaction in Mystery Lights."
A Most Anticipated Book of Summer The Millions
"Social media influencers, ghost hunters, and slasher writers populate these stories…. giving supernatural Southwestern Americana."
Clare Beams
"Lena Valencia writes some of the best stories I've read in years, as sharp and finely honed as knives. Here are women who turn out to be powerful enough to meet the threats of their worlds in kind: their lives may cut them, yes, but they can cut back, and astonishing truths are laid bare in the process. Both bold and sly, in turns righteously angry and sinister, Mystery Lights offers a brilliant new vision of what it means to be a woman in this world."
The Brooklyn Rail
"Delightful—menacing, smart, cozy-creepy, both strange and familiar—and it provides a vexing reflection of modern society."
The Rumpus
"Eerie and unsettling; Valencia’s deft writing allows her readers a peek into each character’s specific nightmare."
Adroit Journal
"Wryly crafted. . . . a delightful debut that renders our most abstract hauntings concrete."
A Best Book of Summer The Los Angeles Times
"Delicious. . . . In the umbra of these darkly tinged stories, readers will experience late-night fears and the sweet relief of daylight."
Library of America
"Southwest Shirley Jackson: that’s the comparison that floats like ectoplasm through the minds of readers who encounter the horripilating stories of Lena Valencia."
New York Times Book Review
"Eerie. . . . depict[s] women as artists, cult leaders and lost souls who are often on a path of self-discovery and frequently brush up against the supernatural."
Lit Hub
"Shimmers with eerie desert locations. . . .She conjures up vivid characters with complicated relationships, and chill-inducing supernatural phenomena. Each story reverberates with strangeness and suspense."
A Most Anticipated Debut of 2024 Barnes & Noble
"Razor sharp and disconcerting, Mystery Lights is a collection of speculative short stories with a bite. From the supernatural to the otherworldly and beyond, these ten stories range from the terrifying to the ugly, suspenseful to quietly disquieting. Valencia will make you stare at the sky in wonder and awe."
a Most Anticipated Book of 2024 Debutiful
"These dark and moody stories are such a treat to read. . . . Read this if you want something a little off-kilter. It delivers on making you squirm, gasp out loud, and think hard."
Kirkus Reviews
2024-05-31
Women get lost in deserts and caves and find strange creatures waiting—including their new selves.
Wellness retreats, guerrilla marketing campaigns, literary blogs, remote Airbnbs in Joshua Tree: Where there is glamour, there is terror in this self-assured debut collection. Although all Valencia’s stories are engaging, those that follow gangs of easily influenced women are the highlights of this set, such as "Mystery Lights," about a marketing campaign in Marfa hijacked by an angry bewigged influencer and her followers, or theBlack Mirror-esque “The Reclamation,” about a desert wellness retreat with a cultlike leader. The gendered nature of the horror genre comes through in these stories’ looming threats of sexual violence, such as in the opener, “Dogs,” in which a woman’s escape from a pack of dogs lands her in a strange man’s locked SUV; “You Can Never Be Too Sure,” in which a myth about a predator prowling around a college campus collides with the truth; or “Bright Lights, Big Deal,” about working in the literary world pre-#MeToo. Girls disappear; some reemerge acting more animal. Some are lost forever to the forest. Aliens and ghosts hover close or fall away. In “Clean Hunters,” a ghost-hunting couple’s honeymoon is called into question when the wife can’t feel spirits anymore. In “The White Place,” a mysterious white orb hovers over a famous painter, her cook’s pregnant daughter, and the man they both are involved with. Valencia investigates the threats lurking behind our wellness brands and cave tours, viral literary aspirations and ski bum college friend groups. Self-actualization, she says, is sometimes not a desert meditation retreat—it may be a cave-dwelling flesh-eating creature. These stories show us there’s not all that much in the way between them.
In 10 eerie stories, Valencia leans into the horror and grit under a shiny world.
