The novel is set in an unforgiving desert during the times of a brutal war. This background acts like a labyrinth, and the inability to escape it fuels the fury inside the characters, resulting in chaotic situations. But the novel ends on an optimistic note, with an oasis of love blooming in even the most barren desert. Fury by Clyo Mendoza happens like a force of nature. An exasperating experience that's equally contemplative and hallucinative, this book portrays a surreal desert that brings out the worst in its characters and shows us how they descend into their personal hell.

I really wanted to like this book more but the writing style was not for me. I think someone that likes poetic prose will like this more than I did!

In the beginning I was overcome with admiration for the beautiful writing, but then it began to feel overwrought. I needed more emotional variety to love it.

Most of the time, when I think of weird fiction, I think of stories that have more of a speculative plot. Stories that take place in alternate universes or timelines, or just odd life occurrences happening to normal people. In Fury by Clyo Mendoza, she writes another type of weird fiction, one where the people are weird and trying to navigate a seemingly normal universe. The book is split into five sections, and each on of them focuses on one of three half-brothers, Lazaro, Juan, or Salvador. The common thread between these three is their father, Vincente, a predator, womanizer, and man who eventually goes crazy and dies as a dog. Each of of his sons play an important role in the lives of the other brothers, and all of them try to scourge him from their personalities. The two motivations of every man in this novel is either sex or revenge, both being equally important and equally destructive to everyone.

There are so many interesting things that happen during the journey through Fury. All of the stories of the men, looking for their love or their revenge, end up with them broken. There is no real outcomes to the anger or jealousy that motivates them, nothing good comes from this. This makes Fury not only a epic journey for all of those involved, but a cautionary tale. The emotions that motivate us will sometimes destroy us if we are not careful. None of the men learn this lesson. There is no redemption. This is what makes this novel somewhat hard to read. Most of the stories readers enjoy are stories where a lesson is learned and the misguided character finds redemption at the end. There is none of this in Fury. Instead we get a group of misguided characters, lost in the desert, motivated by anger or lust, and not a single person finds any sort of solace in the outcome of their actions.

This does not stop their journeys from being compelling. The story is bleak and the characters are broken people breaking others, but the writing is beautiful. It is not surprising that Clyo Mendoza is an award winning poet. What is surprising is that she is barely thirty writing novels with this much depth and darkness. She seems to have a connection to the ugliness in the spirit of man that many writers want but do not have. So many of her paragraphs and scenes that are artful and mind blowing, and the story as a whole, of weird people interacting with a normal world, is written in such a compelling way that we sometimes forget that the people involved are pretty terrible people. Clyo Mendoza is easily one of the best young writers I have read in a long time.


I received an ARC of Fury through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This was a completely fresh and anxiety-inducing book, unlike anything I've read. A super experimental and cyclical narrative, with a host of characters that gradually blend into one. By turns horrific and meditative, Mendoza keeps pulling certainty away from the reader. The whole book felt like I was roaming the desert in a haze, just like Lázaro and Juan.

I reckon Literary Fiction is a broad church. I’ve recently flirted with this genre to good effect. So, it seems my overconfidence has got the better of me this time as my attempt to read, and more importantly, understand Fury by Clyo Mendoza.

I felt the need to learn more about Ms Mendoza, yes – she’s a poet, which isn’t surprising as the writing in this book is difficult to follow for the normal reader such as I. Several characters, involved in interconnecting stories, on multiple timelines.

This was so hard for me – not because it’s not good, because some passages, pages, sections had me transfixed. But because, I didn’t understand too much of it and spent considerable time confused. I needed a solid, defined narrative here – and it wasn’t there.

I am sure this book would be a delight and mentally stimulating to someone who is a far better reader than I am – a more educated reader, and person with quals in literature, or an academic.

If you do decide to read this one – be prepared it’s confronting. It’s violent, dark and appears to challenge all sorts of subjects such as war, misogyny, homophobia, cruelty and probably much more. This all plays out in a stark, searing, bleached, desert environment.

I’ll give this 3-stars. Some of my friends would give this 5-stars, some wouldn’t like it at all.

Either way – Clyo Mendoza can write.

The world Mexico's Clyo Mendoza conjures up in Fury provides no solace. It is uncomfortable, misanthropic, and, most of all, just plain hostile. Yet, within the context of the desert landscapes so vividly painted, Mendoza manages to weave together a diverse tapestry of fascinating characters. Expect deftly handled themes of war, queerness, and gender roles, tied together by lyrical and poetic prose that shines off of every page. Fury reads like a Bela Tarr-ified vision of the Mexican desert and the people that inhabit it, and I can't wait to read it again.
Thank you to Claire Kelley/Seven Stories Press for providing an eARC through NetGalley.

Clyo Mendoza's mastery of language, mood, and story are on full display in her debut novel, “Fury”. Christina MacSweeney’s sharp translation is the perfect compliment.

“Fury” consists of a series of poetic snippets of varying length that meander in and out, building upon themselves, creating a tapestry. Characters appear and disappear only to reappear, sometimes alive, often not, occasionally in dreams, that are most often nightmares.

There are few smooth surfaces in Mendoza’s narrative. Life is harsh in Mendoza’s desert. Procreation is raw. Death is never far away. Magic and sorcery abound. Love is fleeting where it exists at all. War and conflict are constant, with combatants not always clear for whom and what they are fighting. Women are mistreated at every turn, with the men eventually paying a retributive price. Sexuality and gender can change in a moment of passion or hate.

To be clear - “Fury” is a composite of horror stories, not for the faint of heart. But it is written in such a remarkable way- haunting, visceral, hallucinatory, phantasmagorical. “Fury” is a profound statement on humanity that makes the reading highly compelling and truly thought provoking.

Thanks to the wonderful Seven Stories Press and NetGalley for the eARC.

I'm sorry, but after 52% I decided that it's not worth any more of my time. The writing might be poetic, but the characters are just weird because even their parents were weird and already the pregnancies were crazy. There's not one "normal" person and the story jumps too much from one narrator to the other. The only constant thing is weird sex. This book is not for me.

The most hallucinating, mind-bending, spectral Mexican novel since "Pedro Páramo." People should read every book Seven Stories publishes, and/or every book translated by Christina Macsweeney. A real gem.

Afterwards, their dicks looked at one other with those small eyes oozing their white liquid. And they looked at each other with their upper eyes too, their, dark, almond-shaped eyes (p. 32). That's literature right there. And the novel abounds with these startling turns of phrase. For example, a bit later in the text: The flies confused the white area between his eyelids with the cuts in the skin of the fruit (p. 37). The novel also abounds in flies, snakes and other pests that haunt the human bodies groping through the bleakness of the arid desert purgatory of Mexico. Here I would usually proclaim this a novel of the year, but unfortunately it isn't, though it is quite good. What I found lacking is temporal specificity. As it is, it reads as a description of wretchedness of human condition - and here I wholeheartedly agree in a sense - but that is also its weakness. Namely, I don't think there's such a thing as a general human nature and thus these kinds of novels tend to lose me, as a general critique necessarily misses the mark. Had it been more time-specific (or, perhaps, it is but I'm missing something culturally specific being on the other side of the world as I am?), what Mendoza writes about machismo, misogyny, homophobia, and extensive violence and general wretchedness of humanity would've been much more powerful.