Gabino Iglesias Reviews Human Sacrifices by María Fernanda Ampuero
Human Sacrifices, María Fernanda Ampuero (The Feminist Press at CUNY 978-1-55861-298-3, $17.99, 144pp, pb) May 2023. Cover by Sukruti Anah Staneley.
María Fernanda Ampuero’s Human Sacrifices is one of the best short story collections of 2023, regardless of genre. With superb writing and a seemingly endless barrage of ideas, turns of phrase, and dark imagery that goes from the supernatural to the unremarkable, this superb collection, translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle, brings an accomplished Ecuadorian writer to English readers for the first time, and is so great that it makes me wish this won’t be the last translation of her work we get.
There are no throwaways in the dozen stories that make up Human Sacrifices. However, there are some standouts that deserve a moment in the spotlight. The opening story, “Biography”, follows a woman – an undocumented woman in a strange country – as she tries to survive. Her life is a constant struggle, but when she ends up in a strange house with an evil man, everything takes a turn for the worse. The story is creepy and the ending is scary, but Ampuero deals with the fear of men that women have at all times, as well as the fear of being a migrant in a hostile place. This combination of horror and social commentary sets the mood for the rest of the collection.
“Believers” plunges readers into a home where two strangers involved in a religious movement are renting a room. This one starts out relatively normal, but soon spirals into a paranoid tale of the apocalypse and strange religious practices.
“Chosen”, which is one of the shortest tales in the collection, starts with the burial of a group of surfers and almost immediately morphs into a poetic tale of being a woman and what that means in a specific place and time but also in a universal way. Fast and strange, the writing in this one shows Ampuero’s talent for poetic language that cuts to the core of what it means to be human for each of her characters: “The day will come, yes sir, when everyone will notice us and will say to anyone who will listen: Love them. Love them. And that mandate will travel the earth. The day will come when we wipe away each and every one of our tears.”
“Sister”, perhaps my favorite story in the collection, mostly pulls readers into the sad inner world of a young girl who has been taught to loathe herself because she’s overweight. She constantly compares herself to her cousin, who is thin and stays that way by vomiting almost every meal. A sharp critique of Western beauty standards and the psychological, social, and emotional damage they do to young girls, this one takes a supernatural turn at the end that will leave readers reeling.
Ampuero’s writing is superb, and every tale in Human Sacrifices is a small gem full of horror that comes at the reader in unexpected ways. Latin America is having a great moment in horror, with voices like Mariana Enriquez and Agustina Bazterrica delivering some of the year’s best books, and Ampuero earns a spot next to them with this collection.
Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist, professor, and book reviewer living in Austin TX. He is the author of Zero Saints and Coyote Songs and the editor of Both Sides. His work has been nominated to the Bram Stoker and Locus Awards and won the Wonderland Book Award for Best Novel in 2019. His short stories have appeared in a plethora of anthologies and his non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and CrimeReads. His work has been published in five languages, optioned for film, and praised by authors as diverse as Roxane Gay, David Joy, Jerry Stahl, and Meg Gardiner. His reviews appear regularly in places like NPR, Publishers Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, Criminal Element, Mystery Tribune, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other print and online venues. He’s been a juror for the Shirley Jackson Awards twice and has judged the PANK Big Book Contest, the Splatterpunk Awards, and the Newfound Prose Prize. He teaches creative writing at Southern New Hampshire University’s online MFA program. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.
This review and more like it in the December and January 2023 issue of Locus.
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