Goddess of Filth
in a nutshell: Five girls hold a seance together at a birthday party for their friend who is leaving their small border town on a scholarship to college. Shit goes very sideways when that friend starts to bleed, crawl, and chant in Nahuatl, the language of their Aztec ancestors. As weeks go on, the girls try to piece together what the Inhabitant taking over their friend wants, as their normally shy buena nina pal starts to change, vibrate with an ancient power and wear extremely heavy eyeliner.
the vibes: If The Craft starred the girls from Mi Vida Loca but instead of gangs they're dealing with diasporic cultural loss, femicide, and exorcisms.
main themes: A Chicana take on sin-eaters, possession, the potentiality of teenage girls, and the denial of future to those in the cycle of poverty. How the power of potentiality is gifted-- not earned-- to those who acquiesce to certain societal rules. What might it look like if young girls gave each other, themselves, power instead? Also, priests and parents just don't understand, man.
the writing: Fantastically creepy descriptions of possession, sin-eating, and body horror. The dialogue kept taking me out of it, but not egregiously. At 141 pages it was a very fun bite, a spunky Chicana power fantasy with a few genuinely spooky scenes.
Lourdes (who I kept picturing as Sad Girl from Mi Vida Loca) has no apparent future beyond taking care of her younger siblings and sweating away the days behind the counter at Sonic. Her close-knit friend group has placed their collective hope in Fernanda, their one friend who may be able to break out of the cycle of poverty and make something of herself. This potentiality is what draws the Inhabitant into her, and as It starts to work within Fernanda, Fernanda learns to let her hair down a little (beyond sneaking out at night to go to a club with her pals, she also does a little sin-eating and gender revenge here and there, who wouldn't?) This group of girls who have no monetary, societal, or familial capital are drawn to the idea that their tamest friend could wield ancient and terrible power. *raising my cocktail:* Good for her!
While at first I thought 'the "ominous" is missing,' because I'd been reading books that worked to ratchet up a sense of tension and horror, I came to enjoy that the other friends are worried for Fernanda but not as perturbed as one might expect. "Oh dang, Fernanda is definitely possessed. ... Now what?" This easy acceptance of the supernatural is in line with work I've read from other LatAm authors. For Mexicans especially, it's not out of the ordinary for the veil between worlds to be thin-- they have a lovely holiday celebrating it! The slightly blase attitude is also due to their youth, as the adults around them are extremely upset and definitely do not want Fernanda living a little. Ultimately they all agree on one thing though: we gotta get her ready for college, and if she's squatting in the yard bleeding into the dirt while chanting in an ancient language, her ability to make it to her classes will be impeded.
A villain emerges, who has his own designs on the power Fernanda hosts, and his storyline does create more tension in the second half of the story, to kind of balance out the girls' lessening fear about the goddess of filth. Ultimately, the fact that this is a Chicana tale means the shapes the story beats take are not the same as other possession books, but that makes it pleasantly unique. Would I overall describe the book as scary? Not really, but it is fun.
"Tell me your sin," she hissed. "Confess."
Growing up in Los Angeles, I've attended candle vigils for missing local women, just like the girls do in Castro's story, and lamented that the amount of photos on the ofrendas just continues to grow. We all grew up hearing about the horrors of Juarez and the missing women no one seemed to care about. So I was stoked to see Fernanda using her newfound sin-eating powers to do a little gender justice, eating serial rapists in bathroom stalls and human traffickers on the side of highways. A little power fantasy about avenging femicide makes for an engaging read!