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Monsters in America: Review of SUNDOWN IN SAN OJUELA, M.M. Olivas' Debut Horror Novel

Writer's picture: Eli LaChanceEli LaChance

“You’re you, there’s nothing you can do about that.”


Do you know who you are? M.M. Olivas’ debut novel, Sundown in San Ojuela is full of characters either wrestling with, running from, or discovering their identities. Part gothic horror, part bildungsroman, part neo-noir western, the book is full of darkness. The evil presented in San Ojuela is fictional, but likely recognizable wherever you go in this country. In many ways, San Ojuela is every small town in the U.S. We’re introduced to the titular setting through Oliver; a young man living with his undocumented parents, desperate for escape from his mother and father, and from this feeling of being different that even he hasn’t yet seemed to fully uncover. Olivas describes Oliver’s depression in shape and form but leaves it unnamed and open for interpretation from the reader, but I suspect some readers will recognize it more clearly than others. What we can say concretely about the individual is that their father wants them to fit into a masculine box and that he’s isolated by losing his friends to colleges he cannot afford. In frustration, he lashes out and hits the open road in his father’s prized car without knowing where he’s going.


There’s a fitting irony to being introduced to San Ojuela through a need for escape because this is a novel about things you cannot run away from. Upon his arrival, Oliver finds himself violently harassed at an ICE checkpoint. After, he soon encounters a battered boy fleeing a salivating mob of hegemonic conformity in the form of small-town teenagers shouting homophobic and racist slurs. Things are not as they appear with the boy in the black-striped serape, now sitting shotgun, and he leads Oliver to Casa Coytol, a legendary Spanish hacienda, the local haunted house of San Ojuela. There’s quite a bit more than ghosts lurking behind its walls. I’ll leave Oliver's fate to you, reader, but all this is prologue.


From here, the novel picks up with ‘Dark Liz Who Can See the Dead,’ the first of many main POV characters. Liz is nineteen and a dancer who sees ghosts. She believes her sixth sense is the result of losing her soul. Upon learning of the death of their tía Marisol, she and her sister must return to San Ojuela where they spent time as children living with their father and aunt. As they stand to inherit her estate, the task of getting their tía Marisol’s affairs in order falls to teenage Liz, her younger sister, and their mother. The girls are infamous in San Ojuela, as the two children who, according to local legend, disappeared from Casa Coytl, the hacienda which is now the bulk of their inheritance.


Samuel was the caretaker of Casa Coytl, hired by tía Marisol, and his presence is immediately suspicious. He's got a little Mr. Dark from Something Wicked this Way Comes and Leland Gaunt from Needful Things in him. He lives on the grounds and runs a local antique store, the archetype fits him like a well-worn suit, though his fascination with Mesoamerican culture and the conquistador armor he possesses sets him apart from his literary forebears.


The large, diverse cast of characters are intimately relatable, something I'd attribute to Olivas’ emotionally layered and poetic prose that translates even the most specific of situations into something recognizable. This is absolutely not universal, but even violent unlikable characters are painted with such humanity that they feel distinct, understandable and alive.


The prose style varies depending on the point of view, Dark Liz is told in the traditional third person which lends a kind of omniscience to the reader. We get the sense that Liz, haunted by the dead, is never alone and is always being watched, which is true but it also parallels her anxiety. She’s struggling with the secret feelings she has for her classmates in dance, and to accept herself. In denial and fear, she finds herself broken, without a soul, and tied to the embodiment of death.


Then there's the vampire, the Teōtl, the boy in the black striped serape who contains “the night.” He fears the darkness within him and wants to rid himself of the curse. Told in the second person the prose emphasizes his alien nature as he often feels disconnected from his own experience. This is a character at war with himself and the passages in which he loses control emphasize this. His identity is eventually revealed, but I’ll leave that for the page. This character is burdened with an unfair amount of trauma, a lost boyfriend, and all the brutality queer children all too often face in small towns across the USA.


Sheriff Jackson is made relatable by the first-person present tense, which lends his passages intimacy but also a coercive tone. A former ICE agent, and a Hispanic son of immigrants, Olivas renders him skillfully with humanity, wracked with guilt and full of uncontrollable violence and rage. I found something sympathetic in him, but he is also a character I found irredeemably poisoned by his macho worldview. Even when he sees the consequences of his violence, that he’s hurting people, he’s unable to imagine a world where he isn’t a bruiser in a pair of boots which is sort of how he finds himself as Sheriff, wanting to stop the Chupacabra he encountered during a bloody ICE raid in his former life. Subject to the demands duty places on property over people, he breaks people as they lash out against the broken system he represents.


Ultimately, all of the characters share Latine identities and are living in a very honest depiction of contemporary America, where their families are subject to the fascist abuses of a country fueled by the schizophrenic white nativist delusion that has polluted our political discourse like toxic waste. In this book, ICE is the most sinister evil among cosmic Gods and actual vampires. The juxtaposition of the normalization of human cruelty with metaphysical evil had an absurd way of elevating the more sinister and monstrous nature of the former. Even the title takes on a double meaning, San Ojuela, home to vampires, is assessed as a “sundown town” by Oliver early in the novel referring to the ICE checkpoints sure to stop any non-white passer through.


As the blood starts flowing, and Sheriff Jackson finds himself with more bodies than answers, Liz and Mary find themselves in ever-increasing danger as they reconnect with their old childhood friend who may not be the same boy they left in San Ojuela.

There’s a lot to juggle here, and as the book picks up pace, you may find yourself fighting whiplash as the literary voice skips from character to character, but I never found it too dizzying to keep up with. Given the environment this book was released, now exacerbated from the time it was written, this is often a difficult read. The prejudice and brutality of colonialism, racism, and queerphobia are all thoroughly examined. Both queer and Hispanic identities are central to this novel with the bloody history of colonialism, Hispanic legends, and the Mesoamerican mythology informing much of the text. Undoubtedly, readers will be forced to confront things that are currently happening to their queer and immigrant neighbors.


Sundown in San Ojuela works as a horror novel because it understands what’s scariest in the world is the way we treat each other, and the way we turn one another, and ourselves into monsters. Reader, this one is dark, I must warn. Some characters that deserve survival and happiness don’t find it. But it’s not without hope which is found in each other and cooperation. At the end of the day, this book feels like it will find a home in the hands of outsiders. It feels like it was written as a plea to keep going. It feels like it’s for “you, who want to live.” Live to spite it all.


Sundown in San Ojuela was released on November 29th from Lanternfish Press and is available now. Below, you'll find links to purchase from local St. Louis bookshops that Nocturne is NOT affiliated with but firmly believes deserve your loving patronage.


  • Edited after a kind friend pointed out the improper spelling of the word tía.


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