In the opening of M.M. Olivas’s debut novel Sundown in San Ojuela (Lanternfish Press, 2024), Oliver needs a safe place to rest. Exhausted by his father’s “machismo-soaked idea of what a man was,” he drives off in the family Dodge Challenger, only for an ICE officer to slam his face onto the pavement. When Oliver witnesses locals chase a Boy out of a gas station, calling “words like wetback and bitch and witch and prick and faggot,” he accepts the Boy’s offer for mutual sanctuary in a haunted house. Not a Victorian, but a Spanish hacienda: Casa Coyotl. They creep through its green shadows while the Boy’s eyes glow dull red. The Boy questions Oliver’s automatic trust after hearing the Witch accusation. “You’re not afraid of me,” the Boy says. Oliver replies, “Because I don’t think I have a reason to be. It’s normal people that hurt people.” Oliver greets the macabre vibe with the wryness of a self-aware main character in a horror story. When the Boy chants the local song about Casa Coyotl and sharp teeth, ending, “Para comerte mejor / El cuerpo hasta los huejos,” Oliver quips, “I mean, yeah, that’s definitely a creepy-as-fuck song, I guess.” A monster appears. Then another. Their blossoming relationship takes a strange turn. And that’s just Olivas’s first chapter.
Sundown in San Ojuela is a blood-curdling page-turner, body horror by way of Mesoamerican gods and ICE guards. Olivas’s novel is a gross-as-hell ghost story and a razor-sharp vision of the present moment, a multi-narrator rollercoaster you’ll binge like your favorite television show. This novel has everything. An ancient severed hand. Chupacabras. An eerie groundskeeper. A sign in the woods reading: HELLMOUTH GATE. And maybe the most formidable of all: queer ballerinas. Loner dancer Elizabeth feels like she’s walking around with a black hole inside her. But then again, she is. A few years ago, La Muerte crawled out of a mirror to snap a Polaroid of the void where her soul should be, then gifted Liz with the sight. Now she sees ghosts everywhere. Her younger sister, Mary, joins her on a train ride to Casa Coyotl after their Tía Marisol dies. If Liz hopes to find her soul there, Mary wants to reclaim her heritage since “Tía Marisol, their father, and the house in San Ojuela were the last crumbs of a culture Mary only knew secondhand.” The two teenagers find a gentrified San Ojuela, its On the Border restaurants replacing the former bakeries run by abuelitas. The local Sheriff is a former ICE officer who “spent months tracking down families and dragging away parents with expired visas.” He cannot tell if the locals fear his Sheriff badge or a Chicano bearing one. “Give him dark skin and suddenly they don’t know what to think, asking themselves, should they be less scared? Or more?” With San Ojuela, Olivas tosses her characters and their monsters into a metaphorical mosh pit, then yells, “Go!” The result is a transfixing act of horror maximalism, a genre-bending race through hairpin turns. If Olivas’s characters refuse to adhere to the rules, so does the novel itself. Liz says, “If this was a horror movie, the house was not playing its part.”
But true to body horror, San Ojuela escalates into a bloodbath. As the amputations and wounds pile up, Olivas writes toward squick, not the squeamish. But the violence is only gratuitous if you’ve already turned away from real-world stakes. In a recent interview, Olivas says, “[S]peculative horror has the unique ability to make literal the horrors and trauma that people must endure as part of their everyday lives. I can say as a trans woman and a first-gen Chicana that horrific things happen within my communities, things that become as regular and mundane to us as getting to work. Reading about barbed wire installed in the Rio Grande, or going online to see another trans person dismembered solely because they existed as themselves—it’s fucking horrifying, but it’s real. It’s now. It’s all around us.”
As of early December 2024, a conservative US Supreme Court debates the ban on gender-affirming care for transgender children. The Human Rights Campaign reports that gender-affirming care can reduce the risk of suicidality in children by over 70%. Roughly half of transgender and nonbinary children consider attempting suicide. In states that passed anti-transgender laws, the suicide rate for trans and nonbinary children increased by up to 72% in the following year. The stakes are monstrous. The Speaker of the House simultaneously announced an immediate ban in the Capitol, disallowing trans and nonbinary people access to bathrooms aligned with their gender identity. When activists protested, police arrested them. The president-elect also vows to eliminate birthright citizenship in the US on his first day in office, a devastating prospect for the 13 million undocumented people in residence. The current administration has already laid the foundation for mass deportation, in contrast to Biden’s public remarks on opposing private jails and their cruel living conditions. A recent investigation found ICE contract negotiations to expand their capacity for almost 5,000 more people, in addition to the 39,000 already detained. The stomach-turning violence in Olivas’s novel only centers our gruesome reality as it already exists. The news feeds often feel like drinking from a firehose spouting contaminated water. We’re living the horror now and now and now. But San Ojuela tries to wake us into self-awareness alongside its characters, not only as witnesses but participants, demanding that we acknowledge our role and fight.
The novel plays with duality like a coin, revealing everything as a shadow of itself. People and the monsters they fear. Twin deities. Substitute mothers, found in aunts. A swelling heart, nestled beside a void. When Liz’s father recites William Blake, she mishears, “What immortal hand or eye, / Could frame thy fearful symmetry.” He says, “Pinche niña, it’s not a cemetery. It’s symmetry.” San Ojuela is a book of cemeteries and symmetries, characters who mirror each other like Rorschach blots, dead or not. Olivasreveals how the fear of being a monster often transforms someone into one. The Sheriff keeps visiting a woman he found in the desert, just before quitting ICE. She was searching for her missing brother, an activist who moved immigrants over the border. But the Sheriff insists there was something else out there that night. She says, “The only reason you’ve kept coming back years later is because you don’t want to believe your own memory. You want me to change what you saw.” Why go looking for monsters in the dark, when you are one? If Liz carries a void inside her, the Sheriff is a black hole himself, stuck in a loop of indiscriminate violence, demanding compliance with his gun. After getting hit with a water bottle, the Sheriff assaults a random protester. “I grab the closest picket sign I can reach and snap it across my knee, regardless of whether the owner of it is innocent or not—he’s guilty enough by association—I push the fucker into the dirt.” When the Sheriff recalls his childhood, saying, “Belts with brass knuckles bit more than ghost stories excited me,” he denies the lethal bite of his pointed teeth.
If Olivas identifies the monsters among us, she also offers the blueprint for fighting them. In the opening chapter, Oliver hesitates before Casa Coyotl, wondering at the privilege of appreciating sites of historical suffering as art. Liz and Mary find the house packed with a strange archive of artifacts, trinkets of indiscernible origin. They research indigenous and Spanish sources for answers, alongside their ancestry. The novel reaches back to the conquistadors to correct the record. The yawning maw of colonization is a void itself, created by stealing power, and then consuming more and more to retain itself and spread. Right-wing politicians often deploy “family” to justify violence, including the current attack on birthright citizenship. The president-elect recently stated, “I don’t want to be breaking up families, so the only way you don’t break up the family is you keep them together and you have to send them all back.” Olivas flips the family on its face by ripping up the idea of ancestral purity, while restoring power to the rightful inheritors of the land. Liz “knew she had indigenous roots, and Catholic ones shipped to Mexico from overseas. They’d interwoven and made themselves inextricable from one another. A violent merger that had birthed something new.” Olivas serves us colonization as cannibalism manifest, an attempt to devour history from blood to guts, no satisfaction to its hunger. The novel’s unrepentant villains are the people who destroy when they can no longer possess. Colonizers are citizens who should ask for birthright protection, but somehow, they’re signing all of the certificates.
To fight back, Olivas studies the body of history, but also embodiment. Liz remembers ballet advice from her Tía Marisol, who “told her performance meant being in the moment, in the body. And Elizabeth wanted her body to feel—wanted to occupy it and tell its truth.” Liz is wary of becoming the “token goth Latina friend,” “prone to moping and wearing black, always listening to music that her mom called ‘hideous.’” But if body horror distinguishes itself by the amount of control a character holds over the violence upon them, San Ojuela shows that all QTBIPOC people are the main characters in a polyvocal horror story. If the soul occupies the body like a conqueror, Liz (with her void) is an unoccupied subject. Free. A character says, “You have choices in the gulf separating What-has-been from What-could-be, deep in the gory What-is. Like now. You’re waiting on the blade’s edge.” Every page of San Ojuela hurls us through carnage, as well as the systemic realities that create that carnage. If Olivas gifts us with new victors, the novel calls for us to reclaim our own stories as well.
San Ojuela is a ferocious debut, heartbreaking and visceral. When Liz ghost-hunts upon arriving at Casa Coyotl, she wonders, “What slaves stuck around near their chains once they were free to go?” If San Ojuela cannot change the bigoted realities of our current moment, the novel unshackles us to do so and proves a fun ride along the way. Come for the chupacabra. Stay for the queer Halloween ballerina intervention. (Yes, it’s perfect and beautiful.) Olivas’s novel celebrates the insistence upon living in resistance, even when everything in this world wants you dead.
