Interweaving pop culture references and horror concepts drawn from from Herman Melville, H. Each day she edges nearer to a total break with reality. Meanwhile, their literature teacher Miss Clara, who is obsessed with imitating her dead mother, struggles to preserve her deteriorating sanity. Even more perilous is the secret Annelise and Fernanda share, rooted in a dare in which violence meets love. When Fernanda, Annelise, and their friends from the Delta Bilingual Academy convene after school, Annelise leads them in thrilling but increasingly dangerous rituals to a rhinestoned, Dior-scented, drag-queen god of her own invention. So how does Fernanda end up bound on the floor of a deserted cabin, held hostage by one of her teachers and estranged from Annelise? “Was desire something like being possessed by a nightmare?”įernanda and Annelise are so close they are practically sisters: a double image, inseparable. Therein lies its true horror.Finalist for the 2022 National Book Award in Translated Literature! Its consideration of humanity’s worst is shocking not because it is implausible, but because it is honest.

But it is in these stories’ vulnerable explorations of violence and desire – in the unraveling of the characters’ morbid curiosities and futile hopes and starved compulsions – that the heart of Ojeda’s collection has its seat. Grappling with themes such as femicide, perversion, death and grief, incest, mutilation, and the occult, many of the tales found in Las voladoras are guaranteed to unsettle. Unfolding in the mountains, volcanoes, and shrubland of the Andes, the stories in Las voladoras meticulously probe into the unspeakable and genuinely horrific: In the circular “Sangre coagulada,” the orphaned Ranita – a young girl harboring a fascination with blood – is sent to live with her grandmother, an old woman whom locals suspect to be a witch, while noise musician Bárbara fantasizes about cutting off her twin sister’s tongue during an underground music festival in the story “Slasher.” Others turn to the mystic to interpret the corporeally jarring, as is the case in the book’s title story, which employs the symbolism of Ecuadorian legends to articulate a young woman’s coming of age, and in “Cabeza voladora,” where a college lecturer who is still reeling after discovering her teenage neighbor’s severed head becomes increasingly drawn to a cult of women who secretly convene at the scene of the crime.

Drawing from Ecuadorian folklore, oral storytelling traditions, and Inca mythology, Mónica Ojeda delivers a short fiction debut that is as discerning as it is visceral, a hair-raising and deft collection that expands the possibilities of contemporary Latin American Gothic literature.

Nefando by Mónica Ojeda