It’s telling that the only characters with any real measure of control – a police chief and a narco boss, morally indistinguishable – are the only ones from whose perspective Melchor never writes. The near-dystopian onslaught of horror and squalor leaves you dumbstruck, as Melchor shows us the desperation of girls cruelly denied their ambitions, railroaded into household service or worse, and the depravity of boys for whom desire comes fatally muddled with power and humiliation. If she has any ethical doubts about the project, she keeps them to herself this is fiction with the brakes off The object isn’t clarity, but complication: the Witch, it turns out, might actually be a man and there are three of them. Melchor’s long, snaking sentences make the book almost literally unputdownable, shifting our grasp of key events by continually creeping up on them from new angles. What follows is a brutal portrait of small-town claustrophobia, in which machismo is a prison and corruption isn’t just institutional but domestic, with families broken by incest and violence. In vigorous, earthy language (Sophie Hughes’s resourceful translation raids US and British slang for what you guess must be a pretty creative repertoire of curses and epithets), we’re plunged into the chaotic lives of several villagers in the Witch’s orbit, including druggy layabout Luismi, seen leaving her home the morning her body was found his pal Brando, tormented by secret lust and his lover, Norma, a 13-year-old runaway carrying her stepfather’s baby.
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