348 pages
Published 2024
Read from May 5 to October 6
Rating: 4 out of 5
As with Kay Chronister, author of Desert Creatures, I had the honor of publishing one of M. M. Olivas’ early short stories in my sporadic career as an indie press editor. Her “The Man Who Fed Dilophosaurs” is a standout in The Mesozoic Reader. If I had a nickel for every time I published early work from an up-and-coming genre author who would go on to write critically praised horror novels set in or around SoCal, I’d have two nickels, etc.
Sundown is an ambitious first novel, nonlinear prose-poetry layered with different perspectives. First person, second, third, flashbacks ranging from characters’ childhoods to the depredations of the conquistadors—we got a bit of everything. You never know, from one chapter to the next, what thread the story will follow. This can make for dense reading at times. (Especially when your attention span frays partway through, and you want to get back into it months later. Though that’s on me, not this book.)
In no surprise to me, Olivas’ prose is lushly sinister, making you taste and feel the desert wind as well as the hostility boiling out of racist assholes in town. Sundown pulses with magic bloody and beautiful. Hungry gods haunt the night, while ICE preys through the day. Sisters Liz and Mary are brought back to Casa Coyotl after the death of their Aunt Marisol, but San Ojuela’s secrets are deep, ancient, and full of bones; there is always more hurt, more trauma and betrayal, the further one digs. A hemisphere’s worth of injustice demanding redress.
