COCKFIGHT

Some say home is where the heart is, but in Ecuadorian writer Ampuero’s English-language debut, a collection of brutal and brutalizing stories, home is not a place of love or refuge.

Instead, home is a place where women are often abused, neglected, or tortured by those they know best. The 14-year-old maid in “Monsters” tries to warn the twin girls she watches of this fact, telling them that they “should be more afraid of the living than the dead.” She keeps repeating this line, though only at the end do we understand exactly what, or who, she is trying to protect the girls from. In “Mourning,” two sisters suffer, first at the hands of their father, who beats them, and then at the hands of their brother, who brands María, one of the sisters, a whore for masturbating and exiles her to a shed. The story, which catalogs in uncomfortable detail the ways that María’s body is violated, drives toward its point that “cruelty would always triumph over helplessness.” Love, when it is present at all here, is tainted by incest, dysfunction, and poverty, and God has gone missing. At least that’s what the little girl in “Christ” comes to believe after her baby brother dies; neither medicine nor miracles saved him. These stories, none longer than 14 pages, are like tiny, bitter pills. They’re not pleasant, but who said literature needs to be? Instead, they are antidotes against forgetting the myriad forms that violence takes and its psychic costs on those who manage to survive. Ampuero writes with steely nerves and an ear for the beauty of simple, concrete language—not a word feels out of place.

Reading these stories won’t make you happy, but discovering this talented new writer will.