Paragraphing is managed instead by the full stops between extended sentences-breathless, bad-mouthed, resentful sentences, sentences that are fetid, rhythmic and readable, full of insult and gossip, anecdotes and digressions. There are no paragraphs, only chapter breaks. Offering such glints of transcendence at the edge of an ugly killing, Melchor creates a narrative that not only decries an atrocity but embodies the beauty and vitality it perverts. Sometimes, though, this claustrophobic style breaks like a fever, yielding to flights of mesmerically expansive prose. The crime is not an act but an entire atmosphere, which Melchor captures in language as though distilling venom. At times, she enters so deeply into the psyche of sexual violence that she skirts the voyeurism risked by any representation of cruelty. The novel’s tortured self-deceptions and sprung-trap revelations evoke the stories of Flannery O’Connor, or, more recently, the neuroses of Marlon James’s Kingston gunmen in A Brief History of Seven Killings In an interview about that novel, James spoke about the need to 'risk pornography' in the portrayal of violence-and Melchor certainly does. Hurricane Season belongs to the Gothic-grotesque tradition of the transnational American South.
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