A brilliant blend of horror, fantasy, and Mexican folklore. Some truly horrifying imagery and a plot that keeps you nailed to your seat reading. I loved this book.

After her aunt’s death, Liz returns to the desert town of San Ojuela, site of a childhood trauma. Liz has to reckon with her past and family secrets in order to dispel the darkness in this town. This reminded me a little bit of The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas mixed with The Devil Takes You Home by Gabino Iglesias.

This felt like a case of everything but the kitchen sink. There were so many POVs and horror elements/tropes that it felt a bit unfocused and bogged down. I wanted to like this more than I did. 2.75

Oh this book… I think it’s a 2.5 stars, I am torn so I’ll just round up to a 3 for a good effort.. alright let’s get into it. I loved the synopsis for this one and paired with the fact that it gripped me in right away, I had SUCH high hopes , I really did. Unfortunately it just did not live up to what I had hoped and it took a really long time for me to get through. And I’m so sad about it.

I have found that I absolutely LOVE Latin American folklore, so again you can see why I was drawn to this book. I won’t say much as I don’t want to spoil it- it totally did have those aspects mixed in, but again I find the human element ruined it for me. That seems to keep happening. But I found some of the characters to just be tedious (there was a lot of characters!) and I truly didn’t care, which made it hard to get through as I kept losing interest. It took me 10 days to finish, which is abnormal for me. I typically read a book in 2-3 days. Each time I went back to the book I kind of sighed… like oh here we are again with this character I just don’t care about.

I think if all the extras were taken out and it just focused on the main character and maybe one or two side characters just trying to battle evil, it would have been better. Too much was going on.

Also the use of “You” in one of the main sections really took me out… “You walked to bla bla bla”… I don’t envision myself being a character? it’s like watching a movie in my head when I read… I’m not in there…. so I would have preferred the character being referred by their name or pronoun. I’m not sure what that was about.

I have to give a huge thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for letting me read this one, I wanted to love it and I’m sorry I didn’t!

Thank you to NetGalley and Lanternfish for the arc. I’ve been having a string of disappointing reads lately, and unfortunately this book only added to it.

My most glaring complaint: nothing in this book serves a purpose. The tense changes, the POVs, the “romances.” I just sat there screaming “WHAT IS THE POINT” on multiple occasions; nothing felt necessary. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. It feels forced, and at worst it felt like a sloppy attempt at recreating a Simon Jimenez book, except in Jimenez’s books his literary choices actually have meaning and a purpose. As a result, this book often seemed incomprehensible. No payoff was satisfying, including the ending. I had no connection to this book or its characters at all. It just all fell flat, and like a block of text that had no idea what it wanted to be.

The author also made choices that harmed my impression of the characters and their characterization. We simply don’t need the Sheriff’s POV. I would have preferred the police as a looming presence. I do see it as an attempt to educate and humanize, which would have worked if the author went about it a different way instead of forcing us inside this random man’s head. Maybe one of the mcs could have had a family member in the police, maybe Samuel is a retired cop, or maybe some mcs had some type relationship with one. It does not help the story having a POV from this rando. Julian’s POV does not help the story either. It would have benefitted the story more to keep Julian as a mysterious and ominous presence instead of immediately clearing the veil. Samuel’s POV would have served much more of a purpose imo. And again, the tense changes add absolutely nothing. As such, I don’t give a shit about any of these characters at all.


Also, the entire plot and premise of this book was different from what I expected from the synopsis. Going into this I was excited to read what I thought was a Latino/Mexican weird and possibly eldritch western. It instead focused on Brujeria and one leathery old fuck who I didn’t care about at all. I would have much preferred the fantasy weird western, with a razzle dazzle of Brujeria, but definitely not what we were served here.

To sum it all up: bruh