Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor

A Review

🎧 Paired Listening — Dale El Biberón by Junior Klan

🌊 Acqua Alta —+150 (exceptional!) 

📖 Read in a garden, in summer rain

Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor, excuse the use of the following meteorological metaphor, is a typhoon of violence in all its heinous forms. The book revolves around the murder of a Witch in a fictional village in what appear to be present times. With each chapter you start to put together a little bit more of the puzzle, piece by piece. Those familiar with true-crime entertainment will recognize the pattern here. However, rather than a traditional “whodunit” the plot functions as a dark examination of human despair, superstition, and generational trauma passed down in neglected, sweltering communities.

One New York Times reviewer places this book in a genre called Gulf Coast Noir. Look it up, it’s sticky. The novel takes a hard look at femicide, a crime Mexico became the first country to formally criminalize in 2012, adding it to the federal penal code after years of public outcry over gender-based killings. Coincidentally, Melchor finished writing Hurricane Season that same year. The book was nominated for the Booker Prize in 2020 and has since been translated into multiple languages, gathering accolades along the way.

The Witch is referred to throughout with shifting pronouns and derogatory names. This instability sits at the crux of why she died so violently, and by whom. The Witch is possibly transgender, dismissed by the town as strange on account of her witchy-ness, on account of her mysterious father, and on account of her mother, who was also the town Witch before her death. Yet all the elder townsfolk visit her regardless of what names they call her behind her back, because the Witch provides various fixing potions and rarely charges for her services. For the young, she throws raucous late-night parties in a home described as trash-filled, damp, dark, filthy.

As one reviewer put it, the relationship between Luismi, one of the novel's central figures, and the Witch functions as a kind of Rorschach test, exposing the fears and suppressed desires of the other narrators surrounding them. Each chapter unfolds without paragraph breaks, a breathless sequence of thoughts and events that pull the reader closer to understanding the context of the Witch's murder, and eventually, the act itself. The reader never gets inside the Witch's head. Everything known of her arrives secondhand, leaving her a little muddled. She seems like more of a myth than a person until the physical description of her body during death. The story tightens and its pace quickens, resembling something more palatable and plot-driven, once Nora, a thirteen-year-old escaping her pedophilic stepfather, arrives to town and is taken in by Luismi. You can see the drama brewing here. Luisimi can’t be in two places at once…or can he?

The novel is a commentary on violence, on what it does to a community, a people, a future, a past. The violence is in the air, the water, the soil, the bricks people use to build their houses. But I will say that the commentary doesn’t feel pedantic the way some “let’s shine a light on this” texts tend to feel. In fact the violence is part of the text itself, part of the verbiage. The prose matches the relentlessness of the subject matter, so you're swept up into it in a way that feels natural. Sophie Hughes, Melchor's translator, renders the novel's Mexican slang in a way that works really well in English. The colloquial language feels at home detailing, and in fact becoming assault, abuse, violation. The language is not clinical. It almost veers close to voyeurism, and yet the disgust the subject matter provokes never curdles into a sense that the words on the page should have remained hidden.

Some reviewers have pointed to the tenderness threaded through a handful of fleeting scenes. Given how overwhelming the violence is throughout, those moments register less in the instant than in retrospect, and, frankly, less as softness than as reprieve before the next wave of devastating violence inevitably comes back to the page. On that note, the pacing, mentioned earlier: Admittedly, the lack of paragraph breaks is a choice that must be made to get the subject matter across, but it does take the reader, at least this one, some getting used to. I was quite frustrated right at first. It felt like I had no choice in the matter, that I couldn’t sit and choose one more chapter because it was already chosen for me. That ended up working in the book’s favor later on, but right at first did take some negotiation.

Melchor has reportedly said she returned to therapy after finishing the book, which is easy to believe. The ending, as if you haven't just been taken for a very rough ride, opens on a stack of mutilated bodies, and drops the reader in on a scene of someone whose job it is to dispose of them as humanely as the limited resources allow. That someone is an old man called grandfather, keeping coyotes from the remains as he covers them in lime, sand, stone, and chicken wire. The bodies arrive piled, chopped, whole, swollen, shredded, and in that day's batch, familiar shapes emerge, likely suspects from the story you will have just finished. The grandfather takes his work seriously, speaking to the dead as he eases their transition out of this life and into whatever comes next. Looking at their lifeless forms through the grandfather's eyes, you get the sense that for these characters, death was always going to be the answer. To kill yourself, to die trying, or to murder whatever stands in the way.