The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse has the whole village investigating the murder. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering on new details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters-inners whom most people would write off as irredeemable-forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village.

Like Roberto Bolaño's 2666 or Faulkner's novels, Hurricane Season takes place in a world saturated with mythology and violence-real violence, the kind that seeps into the soil, poisoning everything around: it's a world that becomes more and more terrifying the deeper you explore it.