Mónica Ojeda: Nefando, translated by Sarah Booker. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2023 [2016].
Around 2015, a story made the rounds of a creepy videogame called Sad Satan that could only be downloaded from the deep web. It was a sinister game, the rumors went, that may have contained evidence of serious crimes. It was said that the dev had been imprisoned, and that the game itself contained malware that would leave .txt files with satanic writings around in your hard drive.
A few months later, a new link to an Onion site for downloading the game appeared on the 4chan boards, which other YouTubers played documented, since it had been a YT channel featuring obscure horror games that had first brought it to people's attention. The player went through a series of dark corridors with low rez textures; overall a pretty amateurish impression. But then the player would be bombarded with jpeg files: photographs from real crime and accident scenes, with decapitated and mutilated bodies.
Fact is, there’s a lot of weird stuff floating around the unindexed web, and so your host picked up this techno-horror novel, new in translation from Coffee House. At the heart of Nefando by Mónica Ojeda is a cursed game of the same name. Revolving around it at are a cast of odd and damaged characters.
Ojeda is a widely awarded young Spanish-language writer. Her third book Mandibula made it into English translation as Jawbone, which was a big hit in the prize circuit.
Ojeda's second novel feels like a post-Bolaño kind of project. Its form is pretty reminiscent of one-sided interviews contained in the middle part of The Savage Detectives. It gathers the testimonials of six individuals renting in the same apartment building in Barcelona.
There is Kiki Ortega, who is authoring a novel of erotica; the literarily-inclined Ivan Herrera; El Cuco Martínez, a youth active in the hacker scene; and most enigmatic of all, the Terán siblings Irene, Emilio, and Cecilia. We cycle through this cast, often through interviews with an unnamed Ecuadorian, who is investigating the fringe and cursed Deep Web videogame containing actual child porn, called Nefando. We also read snippets of Kiki's fiction, what are presumably Ivan's second-person writings, and, toward the end, some drawings by Maria Teran.
The opening chapter under Kiki's heading admirably laid down the tone, with long, flowing block paragraphs in which her reflections about her own writing project are set off with italics. Later on we get snippets of her own fragmentary porno fiction, featuring two boys named Diego and Eduardo.
Her first interview section begins with this salvo about how everyone in the west "participates in BDSM culture," and here the west includes Mexico, leading to a striking analogy that captures the countries of the "South" with the basement location of a sex dungeon.
"Mexico is in North America."
"No. Well, it depends what geography you're talking about. We Mexicans are the South even though we're in the North, y'know? We're like you Ecuadorians. We're the continent's basement. Well, let's say we're the basement steps and you all are the basement itself."
"Yes, that's a good way of looking at it."
El Cuco Martínez himself gives these thoughtful lines on the internet as a kind of "second nature" that has nevertheless taken priority in our environment.
The internet we know is full of places, languages, territories, and it's an alternate world in itself. The strange thing is that, deep down, we don't reinvent anything in this new world. We have this powerful tool, this parallel space that should be ideal, in theory, since it's completely controlled by us, its creators. And yet it has the same functional faults as the physical world — the real one, you might say. All the social problems of our world exist online: theft, pedophilia, pornography, organized crime, drug trafficking, assassinations... The only difference is that everyone dares to be criminals or morally wrong, at least once, in the cyber world, but even when we do, we're embarrassed, as if we're incapable of thinking outside the original format. Humans have created this fantastic space of freedom and made it into a carbon copy of the world system. It's as if we weren't creative enough to invent a new moral code that would work online or new representations of ourselves that challenge the ones we've always had.”
There is no shortage of these moments of a theoretical tenor, especially in the interactions between Martinez and the Terán siblings. El Cuco, we will learn, was instrumental in developing Nefando at the siblings' request.
The most compressed expression of these themes may be in these lines from Kiki's italicized aesthetic reflections, very late in the narrative:
Eroticism is violent, like nature. [...] There is no eroticism that denies horror. [...] Desire is like hundreds of birds crashing into a closed mouth. [...] Horror and desire embrace underwater and forget to breathe.
Fear is already at least halfway toward desire, and vice versa. Things do get extreme once we dig into the content of the game Nefando itself. The novel Nefando takes concern with writers and artists and their own erotic works, and the tapestry these narrators create suggests that so-called transgressive art comes into being from the conditions of producing the art itself. That is, when artists are making art, they go beyond themselves — I become other … it’s the best part of it, really.
Then, I wonder, what does it mean that this text, and its nested texts, including Nefando itself, needs the grotesque horror — child rape and torture and mutilation of women — to achieve the puncturing release that these characters are striving for.
Reading Ojeda’s book really focalized a certain trend in fiction, and its debt to Bolaño’s Savage Detective and 2666. It’s not just the spooky and violent aspects of these great novels that are amplified, but the academic ones as well. Ojeda, Gary J. Shipley, maybe Brian Evenson, and more up and coming writers are fusing Lacanian concepts of subjective experience with 80s-style splatter house horror, with a bit of Bataille’s apocalyptic postmodernism thrown in.
It’s intense, but it’s also pretty fresh!