Hurricane Season

Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor

A stream of dark, fricative shapes fill the page fully, almost suffocatingly, like a crushing mob of people or a spell uttered in a trance, mesmerizing and unceasing. It took me a few pages of Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season to realize what was happening, how I was being not lulled but forcefully sucked into the gnashing mouth of this book.

A polyphonic novel, Hurricane Season’s boiled down story is simple: in small town Mexico, where there are few opportunities for work and pleasure beyond those afforded by substances, sex work, and the drug trade, a trans woman known to the town as The Witch is murdered by a group of young men. This outline of a story is complicated and fractalled outward when told through the perspectives of various characters: a man who is disabled; a young teenage girl who is suicidal after being abused and finding herself pregnant; a crew of rowdy and disaffected teens who are collectively a potent mix of homophobia and transphobia, queerness, repression, trauma, and violence.

In addition to writing fiction, Melchor is a journalist, and the influence of the newspaper on her novel felt evident in the book’s justified-text formatting, its preoccupation with the grisly and covered-up, and in tracing out the arc of big stories about power and violence through the narratives of “everyday people.” Conspicuously missing from the chorus of these everyday- people-narrators, however, is The Witch herself. Characterized as queer, liminal, powerful, and imperilled, The Witch’s presence, and the presence of her mother before her, is uneasily tolerated by the people of La Matosa in exchange for the services (both magical and physical, such as abortions) which she renders her neighbors. She is also characterized as having great agency and will towards self-actualization—despite the area’s relative poverty and transphobia, The Witch supports herself, hosts elaborate parties at her house complete with high-tech sound equipment, and lives the gender and sexuality she desires.

But Hurricane Season begins with this character’s death, and never gives her a chance to tell the story from her own perspective. Melchor may have made this choice for any number of reasons: perhaps as a commentary on the silencing of queer narratives by mainstream media, or as an attempt to viscerally show how it feels when the victim of a femmephobic, homophobic, or transphobic murder suddenly “disappears.” Unfortunately, no matter Melchor’s intent, the effect of her narrative choice is to foreground a murdered trans woman, to exceptionalize her as a Witch, and then to fail to fully imagine or share this character’s own thoughts, feelings, and experience. This decision on Melchor’s part is a shame all the more because of her abundant skill at empathetically imagining inside the heart-minds of the novel’s other characters—characters who are themselves addicted, cast out, traumatized, or victimized in various ways. Melchor has the ability to imagine moments from within the perspectives of unsympathetic or even frightening characters that are alchemical, luminous, everything that could be hoped for in a novel that investigates the effects of huge and uncaring power structures on individual human lives. It is disappointing that she didn’t use this empathetic capacity to create a more humanizing story for the character that serves as the very fulcrum of her story.