Any desert dweller knows the unmistakable smell of the crisp air, the ear-tingling silence, and the feeling of looking up at a sky lit only by stars (and perhaps the occasional UFO, if you’re a believer). As Georgia O’Keeffe said about her adopted home of New Mexico, “It’s something that’s in the air, it’s different. The sky is different, the wind is different.” Desert life has long appealed to artists, inspiring projects as varied as O’Keeffe’s dreamy landscape paintings to films like Robert Altman’s 3 Women.
Now, Lena Valencia’s Mystery Lights (Tin House Books, 2024) has become the newest work of art about the stark beauty and terrifying openness of the vast desert. This debut short story collection captures the atmosphere of the desert perfectly while driving home the fact that when one is surrounded by all that open space, whether it’s daytime or the dead of night, possibilities seem boundless.
In these perfectly paced ten stories, the majority of which take place in desert environments, Valencia slowly dissolves the line between fiction and surrealism. Each story features a girl or woman who is craving something they’re missing, whether it’s their ability to sense ghosts, lost family members, or their own purpose in life. The stories are eerie and unsettling; Valencia’s deft writing allows her readers a peek into each character’s specific nightmare.
The desert landscape both attracts and repels the characters in Mystery Lights. In “The White Place,” a female painter (inspired by O’Keeffe) making art in New Mexico marvels: “This landscape! After so many years, it still excites her—its cold, dangerous beauty. So different from the soft flat fields she came from . . . and worlds apart from New York, where anything you desired could be obtained by simply hailing a cab. The desert is timeless, indifferent.”
But people get lost in the desert, whether it’s the painter’s lover losing interest, or the missing women and girls haunting other stories in Mystery Lights. These missing characters exist in a space between the living and the dead. Just as the desert is defined by its absences—of greenery, of refuge from the sun, of grass, of water—the characters in Valencia’s stories are defined by what they lack.
In “Trogloxene,” Holly’s little sister, Max, vanishes inside a cave during a family vacation to Arizona. Holly has heard “weirder things about the cave,” including “conspiracy theories. UFO sightings near Mount Vista. A two-headed rabbit skeleton found at the entrance. Rumors of a thirty-foot-long snake seen slithering through the Hall of Echoes.” When Max is found, she has a frightening new feral quality; the sister Holly knew has been lost inside the caves. Holly’s normal teenage angst and anxiety is complicated by her increasing worry about her younger sister.
Several of Valencia’s stories are interconnected, adding depth to the themes of isolation and loss. The story of Holly and Max from “Trogloxene” echoes in the closing story of the collection, “Vermillion.” Nancy, whose own daughter went missing years earlier, now listens to the Cave Girl Gone podcast, which tries to solve the mystery of Max’s disappearance. Now, she’s traveling with her husband to hike in the Utah desert. In a section that’s both agonizing and beautiful, Nancy sees a mirage of her daughter in the desert. But as Valencia’s characters learn, reality can slip away in the desert: “It was the smoke, it was the desert, it was something deceiving [Nancy].”
Nancy had been wandering through the desert, walking “a six-mile loop through otherworldly rock formations and a beauty so singular it couldn’t be captured on camera.” Is it any wonder that she sees the mirage of her long-lost daughter? The confusion and longing she feels for her missing daughter recall the unsettling aesthetics of Peter Weir’s 1975 film adaptation of Joan Lindsay’s novel Picnic at Hanging Rock. In that story, young girls also go missing—and if they do return, they’re never the same, like Holly’s sister. The veil between the living and the dead is semi-translucent in Mystery Lights, opening the characters’ lives up to a terrifying array of surreal possibilities.
Valencia also skillfully pokes fun at the hipster desert aesthetic with piercing descriptions of neo-hippie visitors. The painter’s art dealer in “The White Place” shows up at the painter’s home in an outfit “purchased . . . in Santa Fe, that great purveyor of cowboy uniforms for tourists.” In the title story, when a TV crew uses drones to create buzz for a rebooted series, one of the marketers notices parts of Marfa, Texas, “catering to the desert-minimalist-chic trend that was catnip to the Instagram waifs with their peasant dresses and Manson girl hair.” The author’s sharp observations aren’t limited to desert wannabes. In “Bright Lights, Big Deal,” she also skewers the oblivious college grads who move to New York, certain they’ll be the next big thing. The main character Julia knows what she wants:
“You don’t tell your parents this, but you want to write for a media gossip blog. You want to be known in literati circles for your biting wit and your effortless fashion. You want to be featured in New York magazine’s Look Book. You want to be part of the next Algonquin Round Table, the next February House, the next Brat Pack. You tell your parents there’s nothing out there, you don’t want to get sucked into working retail or waitressing, how will that look on your résumé?”
Just like the tourists in desert dress-up clothes, Julia wants the accessories and prestige that come with being a hip, popular writer, but she doesn’t particularly want to write and is unwilling to support herself in any other way. She’s in for a rude awakening.
In “Mystery Lights” and “The Reclamation,” Valencia writes about this commodification of the desert lifestyle typified by events like Coachella and Burning Man. “The Reclamation” is about women who caravan to the Mojave Desert to attend the Glow Time Retreat, an extreme version of a wellness retreat. The leader (a woman named Brooke Soleil) forces attendees to lie down on their stomachs for ninety minutes and stay as still as possible. She urges the women to be observant and mindful, and there is also an unsettling element of competition: Each time a woman moves, she’ll be “marked” with paint. The woman with the fewest marks at the end wins. Mindfulness, in Brooke’s eyes, is less about centering oneself or finding peace and more about who can do it best.
One woman at the retreat is initially skeptical of the exercise, but recalls a childhood memory as she lies prone in the dirt:
“Her father was always waxing on about the beauty of the desert, trying to get her interested in the plants and constellations, the rocks and bones, but for Pat all it meant was sunburn and fatigue, snakes and angry cacti, or screaming in terror as her father dangled her – age three – over the edge of the canyon while her mother laughed. Her parents insisted this had never happened and she was misremembering, but it came back to her each time she stood at any sort of precipice, that tingling in her feet.”
This story subtly shows how quickly cult-like mindsets can take over in the isolation of the desert, as the women living secluded away from society in the desert slowly begin to change—and not for the better. Their wildness comes out, and animalistic tendencies emerge. As boundaries dissolve, the Glow Time Retreat becomes less of a tranquil wellness outing and more akin to Lord of the Flies.
With Mystery Lights, Valencia brings her readers from a familiar world to a world beyond imagination. She portrays both the beauty and the horror of the desert, its landscape, and its inhabitants with the keen eye of someone who is intimately familiar with the rhythms and realities of desert life. Her characters are simultaneously grateful for “the desert’s stark simplicity” and trepidatious about its unknowable aspects (“Small shrubs dotted the land as far as the eye could see. Dark mountains spread across the horizon. It all looked prehistoric, devoid of human life”). For anyone who has lived in the desert and experienced the surreal terrain, reading Valencia’s stories will feel like coming home. For the uninitiated, her eerie masterpieces will prompt readers to open their minds to the wilder possibilities of both the desert and art.
