There are abusive mothers, ruthless drug dealers, unemployed junkies, unwanted pregnancies, and constant bloodshed here. Ībducted and murdered women (you don't want to know what happens to the bodies) are just the start. that's what those f***** do to the poor girls they abduct on their way to the border: they're put to work in the whorehouses like slaves and when they're no longer ripe for the picking, they slaughter them like lamb. And just a warning - the passage you're about to read is brutal:

And their tales are all packed with a blend of gore, hopelessness, and brutality that pushes Hurricane Season into horror territory while also bringing themes like poverty, politics, and migration into play. While the witch's murder is at the center of the plot, the series of unreliable narrators that tell her story constantly shift the narrative's point of view and tone. Sentences that take up two or three pages sound like a horrible reading experience, but Melchor pulls it off brilliantly - I never felt lost, or confused by her style, probably because the voices sound like a regular person telling someone a story instead of an author trying to impress readers with literary filigrees. The result - ably translated by Sophie Hughes - is mesmerizing lengthy sentences that pack entire stories in them, a barrage of filthy language and obscene acts, and pacing that makes readers hold the book tighter. Hurricane Season is a linguistic blitzkrieg - Melchor is allergic to periods and wants to explore how far she can carry a sentence without using one.

Was it fear? Did someone want to protect a secret? Was it for the money she was rumored to keep in her house? A series of characters relate their lives in search of answers, and the darkness within them is as bad as the murder the town wants to solve. Now everyone wants to know who killed her and why. A group of kids discovered her body near the irrigation canals, her face damaged and her neck sliced open. There used to be a witch in a small town in Mexico, but someone killed her.

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. Fernanda Melchor's Hurricane Season is so strange, wild, and foul-mouthed that I almost missed the sharp critiques embedded in the story.

Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor