Nefando

The bracing latest from Ecuadorian writer Ojeda (Jawbone) documents the raw experiences of six roommates in Barcelona. Kiki is a writer composing a pornographic novel "to explore the most unsettling things; to say what cannot be said." Ivan, another writer, is immersed in private BDSM fantasies. Siblings Irene, Emilio, and Cecilia recoil when videos of their father's sexual abuse of them as children are posted online. They decide to process the trauma by having their friend and roommate El Cuco import the videos into his video game, Nefando. El Cuco, who's also a hacker and a thief, revels in the transgressive project, which is outlawed after it goes viral. Though the specifics of Nefando remain enigmatic (it's described only as a "representation of the shit that's all around us"), the game is clearly designed to invite players to indulge in their voyeuristic impulses. Ojeda laces her prose with erudite references to the complex alternate realities crafted by Philip K. Dick and William Gibson. This creepy tale plumbs the uncanniness of virtual reality to powerful effect. (Oct.)

Six young people living together in Barcelona collaborate on a multimedia experience that messes with everybody's heads. If one of the points of transgressive fiction is to trespass on the reader's psyche, often to the point of revulsion, Ojeda's novel is certainly a memorable example of the genre. This phantasmagoric mélange of technology, psychological distress, and body horror is a linguistic marvel and a perpetual engine for the heebie-jeebies. It's an oral history, of sorts, recounting the strange origins of a legendary game that appeared and disappeared on the dark web so quickly that information about it is nearly vaporous. The author's interest in the online horror phenomenon known as creepypasta is clearly at play here. Six starving artists are living together in a flat in Barcelona when their disparate obsessions begin to commingle. Kiki Ortega, 23, is easily the moodiest and most confrontational, a student writing a pornographic novel about three adolescents that appears in large excerpts throughout the narrative. Iván Herrera is a writer infusing his art with his own body dysmorphia. El Cuco Martínez is the videogame designer born from Europe's demoscene who makes the titular game possible. Finally, there are the Terán siblings, Irene, Emilio and Cecilia, who populate the game---based on the mythology of the Backrooms and their disquieting use of liminal spaces--with their own horrific history of childhood abuse. "It was a space for personal exploration," explains Iván. "You could think differently while playing. The Teráns designed it so that the player's experience was a poem." Intensely intellectual, horrific, and disturbing, this tiny nightmare is one of those peek-between-your-fingers pleasures if you're into this sort of thing. As El Cuco reflects, "I suppose we're all attracted to what disgusts us and want to scare ourselves, even though we don't like to admit that fear is pleasurable." A disturbing novel that endorses darkness, suffering, and pain as means to a higher truth. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.