Caren Gussoff Sumption Reviews Human Sacrifices by María Fernanda Ampuero

Human Sacrifices, María Fernanda Ampuero (Feminist Press 978-1-558612-98-3, $15.95, 144pp, tp), May 2023.

It’s a slow burn, immersing oneself in María Fernanda Ampuero’s latest collection, Human Sacrifices – a literal slow burn, like the reader is a proverbial frog in a pot of water, set over a gradually increasing flame. By the time you notice you are boiling to death, it’s already too late. The beautiful and bleak prose, the horrific glimpses inside the uninhibited human mind, and the ut­ter devastation of each of the stories has already worked its terrible magic. You’ve already changed.

For good? For ill? I’m not sure. The collection is uniformly excellent – it’s a feat to have twelve equally strong stories in one collection – but as advertised, it’s a relentless reading experience – impactful, but not always pleasant.

Ampuero is Ecuadorian, and the stories here all center the experiences of women and girls in unnamed Latin American countries and as im­migrants to the United States. They rarely have… an easy time. Murders, rapes, and constant danger follow all the characters, on every page. While there’s rarely a graphic depiction, there is a frank­ness to the presence of brutality, and constant tension: even when (if) a character ends the story alive, there is a very real understanding that they are never safe.

The first story, ‘‘Biography’’, is, simultaneously, one of the most traditionally constructed horror stories of the collection, while possessing some of the most poetic, lush, sentence-level prose. An undocumented woman, somewhere in the United States, makes do with whatever unskilled labor she can, in order to stay afloat and send money home to her family. However, the woman is also a talented writer, so when she gets an offer to travel upstate to ghostwrite the life story of a well-paying client, she leaps at the chance. Of course, the client is a monster, his home is a remote cabin without cell service, and the woman spends the night try­ing to survive until daybreak.

‘‘Edith’’ and ‘‘Lorena’’ both sketch out the me­chanics of abuse within relationships. In ‘‘Edith’’, a woman chooses her own pleasure – meeting a lover for passionate trysts – at the expense of her two young daughters. Edith is aware that while she is out of the house for these meetings that her husband takes advantage of her being gone, and sexually assaults the young girls. Yet, Edith is loath to give up these moments to protect her daughters, something for which she feels both shame and a forthright entitlement to her own happiness. ‘‘Lorena’’ tells a (fictionalized) account of John and Lorena Bobbitt; Lorena was an Ecuadorian immigrant to the United States and Ampuero gives her story, so sensationalized in the media, both a logic and a dignity, even as it careens to its inevitable end.

Children populate Ampuero’s stories as well. In ‘‘Believers’’, a country’s bloody upheaval is viewed through the eyes of a privileged young girl. Even as she befriends the daughter of a servant, her world comes crashing down around her, and the white missionaries her family has harbored may turn out to be less than righteous people themselves. And in ‘‘Pietà’’, a servant of a wealthy family is compelled, in a bizarre, irresistible way, to raise and protect the family’s son – over the health and safety of her own family, even as the son commits a ghastly murder of a local woman.

Even teenage girls get their moment: ‘‘Sisters’’ depicts the casual and biting cruelty girls can unleash upon one another and the unthinking damage adults do to teenagers through their comments and judgment. Three girls – one considered traditionally beautiful by cultural beauty standards, pitted against one considered too fat, and one neglected and ‘‘shabby’’ – try to make sense of their lives and of growing up, culminating in a sleepover where they, predict­ably, accidentally, summon a spirit. It’s a ghost story with only one actual ghost, but many, many hauntings.

Of all the stories, the quietest and most haunting is ‘‘Whistle’’. It lacks the impending physical danger of the other stories in Human Sacrifices, but is no less heart wrenching. In it, a young woman – full of dreams and spirit – is potentially cursed by a supernatural whistling presence to wind up living a life of sacrifice and unfulfillment. Or, maybe not. Maybe there never was a curse, and, instead, this vivacious woman made the choices herself that damned her to her loveless marriage.

Reading this collection in one sitting, as I did, can be challenging. However, taking Human Sacrifices as a whole, each story somehow be­comes a body part in the whole titular ‘‘sacrifice.’’ The women and girls, frequently unnamed, all blend together. But not because they are poorly delineated or characterized; it is because their singular, specific desperation somehow becomes universal, identifiable… tangible. Human Sacri­fices is not always fun, but it is well-written and it is important.

This review and more like it in the June 2023 issue of Locus.

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