The 3 best books of Monica Ojeda

It is not that Ecuador is one of the main Hispanic American literary references today. But everything always depends on generations, on those coincidences that unite storytellers from the same country to end up exporting talent in abundance.

And in that a Monica Ojeda Franco who at his early thirties already aims to be that necessary pen in a narrative in Spanish, always prolific in geniuses of world literature. She, together perhaps with Mauro Javier Cardenas, they point to that literary Ecuadorian awakening with all the verve and brilliance of the world.

Mónica Ojeda takes the reins of her works with that mixture of frenzied youth, with lyricism still sustained in her shared vocation as a poet, and with the natural fondness for the story or the tale that every cradle writer always cultivates as a project, vent or narrative expression in parallel.

As a background a very generational theme, in tune with the times. A true chronicler of her time who will eventually become a necessary narrator of what she was. Today his novels or stories are read with relish at the agile rhythm of his actions without rest but with a lot of thought. An effective and efficient combination of entertaining literature on which to trump that critical point that seems to adorn but is ultimately the very essence of everything written.

Top 3 best books by Mónica Ojeda

Heinous

Like real old curmudgeons, those of my generation are always judging a childhood and youth that seems to hide like vampires from the outside light. But deep down, and a long question goes ... what would have become of us, unworthy inhabitants of boredom on summer afternoons, if we could have known dark underworlds such as those available to youth now?

Gamer experiences are now at the center of gamers' discussions in the deepest forums of the deep web, but users don't seem to agree: was it a horror game for geeks, an immoral staging or a poetic exercise? Are they as deep and twisted as the insides of that room seem?

Six young people share an apartment in Barcelona. In its rooms, activities as disturbing and murky as the writing of a pornographic novel, the frustrated desire for self-castration or the development of designs for the demoscene, an artistic computer subculture, take place.

In its private spaces, the territory of bodies, the mind and childhood is explored. Peering into the abject that connects them to the process of creating a cult video game.

Heinous

Mandible

At my institute there were two teachers who would have gladly walked into our class on the last day to douse us with napalm. And it is the patience of some teachers bordering on infinity. Even the cases in which it overflows ...

Fernanda Montero, a teenage fanatic of horror and creepypastas (horror stories that circulate on the internet), wakes up tied up in a dark cabin in the middle of the forest.

His abductor, far from being a stranger, is his Language and Literature teacher: a young woman, marked by a violent past, whom Fernanda and her friends have tormented for months at an elite Opus Dei school.

The reasons for the kidnapping will be revealed as something much more complex and hard to digest than bullying a teacher: an unexpected betrayal linked to an abandoned building, a secret cult inspired by creepypastas and a youthful love.

Mandible

The flying girls

In short distances Mónica Ojeda is even more intense if possible than in longer works. Synthesizing her vast imagination already points to a compendium of dark, almost gothic lyricism. Imagination and gruesome images and transgressive concepts. It is what it is and it will leave no one indifferent. A volume of disturbing stories made a showcase of horrors and other vestiges of humanity.

Creatures that climb to the rooftops and take flight, a teenage girl with a passion for blood, a teacher who picks up the head of her neighbor in her garden, a girl unable to separate herself from her father's teeth, two noisy twins at a festival of experimental music, women who jump from the top of a mountain, apocalyptic earthquakes, a shaman who writes a spell to revive his daughter.

Las voladoras brings together eight stories that are located in cities, towns, moors, volcanoes where violence and mysticism, the earthly and the heavenly, belong to the same ritual and poetic plane. Mónica Ojeda blows our minds with an Andean Gothic and shows us, once again, that horror and beauty belong to the same family.

The flying girls
5/5 - (8 votes)

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