Norma is thirteen: a runaway from her hovel of a home in the cold of Ciudad del Valle, from her younger siblings and her guileless mother, who has taken in Pepe, who grooms and abuses Norma and makes her pregnant. her sole contribution to the world was the carbon dioxide she exhaled with each breath.’. His view of her is that ‘his mother served literally no purpose. Brando, another teenager, lives with his mother, a church-goer who sits watching TV soap operas or prays for the soul of her son, who she sees as having been infected by the devil. Luismi decides to leave and live with his mother, Chabela, a fast-talking and world-weary prostitute, and his stepfather, Munra, crippled in a road accident and likewise disreputable, who, as he himself relates it, is duped into being the driver in the botched raid on the Witch’s property.

Luismi is a teenage good-for-nothing, reviled by his cousin, Yesenia, because their grandmother, with whom they live with other grandchildren, cannot see the truth of him.

This is not a reading for the faint-hearted. Melchor presents us with a cast of wretched lives, steeped in poverty: prostitutes and drug and alcohol addicts, corrupt police, thieves and rapists. The locality is rife with trepidation at the former, and the latter foments the greed that leads to her demise. Rumour has it that she has sold her soul to the devil, that she has a secret hoard of treasure.

In the village of La Matosa, the Witch lives in her secluded house amongst the sugar cane crops, providing potions and remedies, and loan-sharking. Hurricane Season (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020, translated from the original Spanish by Sophie Hughes) spirals out following the brutal murder of a character known only as the Witch, taking long arcs around the lives and points of view of several others who are either the perpetrators of the crime or who are caught up in connection to those men. From the outset, the reader is submerged, enmired, and Melchor does not let up, holding her captive down, beneath: it is breathless, engrossing yet relentless. Fernanda Melchor’s writing is a brutal cascade of words, a dredge but not a drudge through the underbelly of a small community in Mexico, a two-hundred plus page scream at the vile and vicious depravity of a reprehensible society, of poor choices, of poverty, of males who abuse others in various ways, and of women who must fashion existences of navigation and sufferance.

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