Human Sacrifices

March 13, 2023
Ecuadorian writer Ampuero (Cockfight) explores class, race, and gender inequalities in these visceral stories that often revolve around violence and abuse in Latin America and the U.S. In “Believers,” a rich girl and her housekeeper’s daughter become best friends despite animosity between their families due to their class differences, and they spend their time spying on the white missionaries living with them. “Pietà” follows a house cleaner who feels duty-bound to assist the spoiled young man she helped raise after he murders his girlfriend, while “Edith” provides a wrenching sketch of a woman who is trapped in an abusive relationshipand allows her daughters be sexually abused by their father to buy time with her lover. In “Lorena,” an Ecuadorian woman immigrates to the U.S. and marries a heavy drinker named John (inspired by John Bobbitt), but their passionate relationship turns physically and sexually abusive (“We can never run out of Budweiser,” Lorena narrates. “It’s like they’re sponsoring us. If we run out for any reason John loses his mind. His face turns red and he blames me”). Though the onslaught of bleak situations and violence makes the collection feel a bit one-note, the stories’ strength lies in how Ampuero illuminates her characters’ pain and desperation. There’s a great deal of humanity in these difficult stories.

April 1, 2023
Terrifying stories lay bare the brutality of patriarchy and the violence it metes out on women and children. Ecuadorian writer Ampuero begins with "Biography," a nightmarish story of an undocumented woman who travels to a remote house to meet a man who's offered her money to write his life story. In the next tale, "Believers," a girl living in the shadow of turbulent protests spies on two missionaries who are renting a room from her family. A sense of claustrophobia dwells in these pages. A few stories in, the reader begins to prepare for the horrible thing (or things) that will inevitably happen. Page after page, women and children are brutalized and raped. Confronted by one monstrous scene after another, the reader becomes almost inured to the collection's representations of violence. The stories are strongest when they avoid relying on the shock value of human cruelty and experiment with the possibilities afforded by the form of the short story. "Piet�," for instance, is told in a stream-of-consciousness style from the perspective of a nanny and maid who dotingly watches her charge grow up. The singular point of view and the rapid jumps in time reveal, within the span of a few pages, the tragedy of loving someone who's terrible. In "Sacrifices," the story unfolds completely in direct dialogue between a husband and wife lost in a parking lot. The lack of visual description--usually the bread and butter of fiction--yields deliciously frightening results. Stories that rely heavily on depictions of violence but dazzle with formal experimentation.

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