36 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ NOVEMBER 4, 2019
Reviews
Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season is an
explosive, furious novel about a small Mexican
town ogling its own destruction (reviewed on
this page).Death in Her Hands
Ottessa Moshfegh. Penguin Press, $27
(272p) ISBN 978-1-9848-7935-6
Moshfegh’s disorienting latest (after
My Year of Rest and Relaxation) sends up
the detective genre with mixed results.
Vesta Gul is an elderly woman who has
moved to an isolated cabin on a lake after
her husband’s death—with only her dog,
Charlie, to keep her company. Vesta
finds a note in the woods that reads “Her
name was Magda. Nobody will ever
know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here
is her dead body.” But there’s no body
to be found. While Vesta does do some
detective work (such as using Ask
Jeeves to search “How does one solve a
mystery?”), mainly her mind imagines
Magda’s life, to the point where the
people Magda knew bleed into Vesta’s
own life. Moshfegh clearly revels in
fooling with mystery conventions, but
the narrative becomes so unreliable that
it almost seems random, and readers may
wish for more to grasp onto, or for some
sort of consequence. There’s an intriguing
idea at the center of this about how the
mind can spin stories in order to stay
alive, but the novel lacks the devious,
provocative fun of Moshfegh’s other
work, and is messy enough to make
readers wonder what exactly to make of
it. Agent: Bill Clegg, the Clegg Agency.
(Apr.)Hurricane Season
Fernanda Melchor, trans. from the Spanish
by Sophie Hughes. New Directions, $22.95
(224p) ISBN 978-0-8112-2803-9
Melchor’s English-language debut is a
furious vortex of voices that swirl around
a murder in a provincial Mexican town.
The story opens with a group of boys
discovering the body of the Witch in a
canal. The Witch is a local legend: she
provides the women of the town with cures
and spells, while for the men she hosts
wild, orgiastic parties at her house. Each
chapter is a single, cascading paragraphand follows a different townsperson. First
is Yesenia, a young woman who despises
her addict cousin, Luismi, and one day
sees him carrying the Witch from her
home with another boy, Brando. Next is
Munra, Luismi’s stepfather, who was
also present at the Witch’s house; then
Norma, a girl who flees her abusive step-
father and ends up briefly settling with
Luismi; and lastly Brando, who finally
reveals the details of the Witch’s death.
The murder mystery (complete with a
mythical locked room in the Witch’s
house) is simply a springboard for
Melchor to burrow into her characters’
heads: their resentments, secrets, and
hidden and not-so-hidden desires.
Forceful, frenzied, violent, and uncom-
promising, Melchor’s depiction of a
town ogling its own destruction is a
powder keg that ignites on the first page
and sustains its intense, explosive heat
until its final sentence. (Mar.)The Mercies
Kiran Millwood Hargrave. Little, Brown, $27
(336p) ISBN 978-0-316-52925-9
This dark, dramatic historical from
Hargrave (The Girl of Ink & Stars) begins
on Christmas Eve 1617 when 40 men
from Norway’s remote island settlement
of Vardø die in a storm at sea, setting in
motion events that lead to witch trials
and executions. Maren Magnusdatter,
age 20, having lost her father, brother,
and fiancé in the storm, lives quietly in
Vardø with her mother and sister-in-lawDiinna, of the Sámi people. That changes
with the arrival of noted witch-hunter
Commissioner Absalom Cornet, who
comes from Scotland with his Norwegian
wife, Ursa, to root out nonbelievers.
Unused to such meager conditions, Ursa
hires Maren to help her with household
chores. Their friendship grows, as does
Ursa’s fear of her husband, an enthusiastic
participant in the branding, strangling,
and burning of suspected witches.
Encouraged by the feudal lord who
brought him to Vardø, Cornet seeks out
nonchurchgoers in a crusade against evil
that puts Diinna and other Sámis at risk.
Eventually, Cornet arrests two local
widows, tortures and burns them at the
stake, then comes to arrest Maren, while
Maren and Ursa turn to each other for
affection and support. Hargraves’s tale
offers a feminist take on a horrific moment
in history with its focus on the subjuga-
tion of women, superstition in isolated
locations, and brutality in the name of
religion. This is a potent novel. Agent:
Kirby Kim, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Feb.)Real Life
Brandon Taylor. Riverhead, $26 (336) ISBN 978-
0-525-53888-2
Taylor’s intense, introspective debut
tackles the complicated desires of a
painfully introverted gay black graduate
student over the course of a tumultuous
weekend. Wallace, a biochemistry student
from Alabama at an unnamed contempo-
rary Midwestern university, discovers
his experiment involving breeding
nematodes ruined by contaminating
mold. Though distraught and facing
tedious work, he reluctantly meets up
with friends from his program to celebrate
the last weekend of summer. He discloses
to them the recent death of his estranged
father, who did not protect him from
sexual abuse by a family friend as a child.
Wallace is perpetually ill at ease with his
white friends and labmates, especially
surly Miller, who unexpectedly admits a
sexual interest in Wallace. Over the fol-
lowing two days, Wallace and Miller
awkwardly begin a secret, volatile sexual
relationship with troubling violence
between them at its margins. As Wallace
begins to doubt his future as an academic
and continues to have fraught social
interactions, he reveals more about hisFiction
Reviews