The Summer of the Serpent

A horror-infused, polyphonic work about the violence and cruelty seething in a late-70s Guadalajara neighborhood

A horror-infused, polyphonic work about the violence and cruelty seething in a late-70s Guadalajara neighborhood

At a traveling fair, a young girl visiting with her family will ask a "serpent woman" to tell her future. The serpent woman's answer is cryptic, but back in their neighborhood, the lives of the girl and her sister will be haunted by a ghost and a boa as their world shimmers between the real and unreal.

The Summer of the Serpent gives us a multifaceted, multi-textured look at the sisters, their family, and their neighbors caught in the seething forces afflicting the neighborhood through the summer. Though this will be Ceclia Eudave's first novel to be translated into English, the New York Times has already named her a key figure in the new wave of horror-inflected literature by Latin American women that takes on major social issues, a genre that has come to be known as "narrativa de lo inusual" (literature of the unusual).