More specifically, men insignificant, filthy, perverted men engaging in one big cockfight and leaving a trail of wounded women in their wake.
a downtrodden devotee and the true instigator of Christ’s best known party tricks – think: loaves and fishes, healing the blind.Īmpuero’s sensory evocations are also exquisitely visceral, like when a dead body becomes “a huge doll…filled with stuffing instead of bones” and cum “tastes like Dijon mustard and bleach.” (Did you gag? Be honest.) She also has a knack for the unexpected oration – “I close my eyes and open my sphincter” – and a talent for merely alluding to the sinister, which, in a collection with so much explicit violence becomes all the more effective.īecause while many of Cockfight’s tales feature demons lurking above and below the surface, at the core of it they’re just people.
‘Auction’ (from which the collection takes its name and features a protagonist who protects herself from “macho guys” by stuffing “a rooster head between my legs”) is a standout, as is ‘Passion’ in which Ampuero retells the revivification of Christ through the eyes of “another lost girl in a world of lost girls”, a.k.a. The three opening stories – ‘Auction’, ‘Monsters’, and ‘Griselda’ – reverberate with echoes of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, each one of them blood-soaked and brief. However, these sporadic gratuitous blips are balanced out with equally shocking but better-balanced highs. Take ‘Blinds’ which cannonballs into an incest swimming pool at the close for seemingly no other reason than to splash the reader square in the face with repulsion, or the revenge-fantasy-esque ‘Mourning’. If you’re thinking that this could all easily stray over into gratuitousness, you’d be right at points, it does. This is an animalistic blood-stained, shit-smeared collection of bodily fluids, incest, abuse, and violence, in which men rape, kill, kidnap, and molest and women are auctioned off, abused, and trampled on both literally and metaphorically. But don’t be deterred, because Cockfight also manages to combine its unfiltered darkness and depravity with captivating storytelling and effective recurring motifs of faith, animals, and blood.Īcross a baker’s dozen of short stories, most often centering children or childhood memories, Cockfight distils tales of familial violence behind a bold yellow cover designed by Sukruti Anah Staneley. This post contains affiliate links to independent bookstores.īefore I even started reading Cockfight – the Frances Riddle-translated English-language and fiction debut of Ecuadorian writer María Fernanda Ampuero – a friend voice noted me about it: “Lauren… Cockfight is one of the most fucked up books I think I’ve ever read.” After reading it for myself, I mean…yeah, accurate.
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