Harare Review of Books

154 pp. Published April 1, 2025 by World Editions. Fiction/Ecuador.

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I am bewildered. I’m always up for surrealist fiction as long as I can create a frame for it, and my predominantly left-brained self has learnt to … perhaps not necessarily enjoy, but at least allow myself to be unsettled by narratives I can’t put into neat boxes. Reader, there are no neat boxes to be found here: the experience of this novel is to be in a cart that’s tilted at sixty degrees and hurtling forward on a rollercoaster track. There are two possible and even simultaneous conclusions: this novel may be considered both brilliant and impossible.

(Side note: an author once came for me for saying their book was difficult, something that appears to have scarred me for life. I hope that never happens to me ever again; however, I’m very tempted to use that word again for this novel. Ergo, please do me the favour that author did not, of hearing me out.)

A Carnival of Atrocities centres around Mildred, a girl with some kind of skin condition. She lives with her parents on the outskirts of a village or small town, on a plot of land where they grow crops and raise livestock. When Mildred’s mother dies, her father leaves, promising to come back (but of course he doesn’t). First the priest, and then other residents come one after the other to persuade Mildred to move; when she continues to resist, they eventually move her by force and destroy her home.

Years later the town suffers a strange affliction: residents pick up and leave for the forest and beyond, one by one. They seem to be suffering from some kind of mass delirium, but no one who’s left behind really knows; so the rest of the community sets off to find out. What ensues is fantastical and truly horrifying.

This is a novel of terrible vengeance visited on a whole town after an act of cruelty. I don’t know that Mildred’s anger at how she was treated was completely justified: perhaps the other residents had her interests at heart. (It’s at least possible.) Allowing, though, for Mildred to feel how she felt, the vengeance she visits on them is apocalyptic, terrible in its completeness.

This feels to me an unusually hard-to-read novel, and I found it not entirely to my taste. Part of the reason is how brutal and graphic it could be (I’m one of those people who never watches horror movies). But also, as explained above, reading it was a very disorienting experience.

Nevertheless, A Carnival of Atrocities is certainly very memorable. While I would not necessarily recommend it, I am not regretful that I read it; it’s expanded my reading world.

Thank you to World Editions and Edelweiss for early access.

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