Book Review: Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic edited by Eduardo Jimenez Mayo and Chris N. Brown

Summary:
This collection gathers 34 contemporary Mexican short stories featuring fantasy, scifi, and literary, clearly a wide range.

Review:
For me this collection was very hit and miss, and alas even the hits weren’t that wonderful.  Part of the issue is there seems to be no rhyme or reason behind the order in which the tales are presented.  It feels as if 34 completely random stories were selected with the only thing they have in common being Mexican authors.  I generally prefer a short story collection to have a more universal theme or play upon similar tropes, but there is none of that here.  The stories range from young boys hunting iguanas to figuring out how to dispose of a body to a trophy wife on vacation in Las Vegas to a pact with the devil.  It was a bit of an exhausting collection to read.  That said, I’d like to highlight a couple of my favorites that kept the read from being an entirely troublesome experience.

“Hunting Iguanas” by Hernan Lara Zavala both gives a glimpse into country Mexican life, which isn’t something we get to encounter very much, and provides commentary on colonization.

“Lions” by Bernardo Fernandez was particularly delightful for an animal rights activist to read.  In a time of budget cuts the less attractive animals of the zoo are let loose in the city park and gradually take over.  Delightfully tongue-in-cheek.

“The Nahual Offering” by Carmen Rioja features a disturbingly prophetic dream by a tribal woman.  It is a great example of the beautifully grotesque.

You can see, though, that I was only able to pick out three short stories from a collection of 34 to highlight as particularly enjoyable to me.  The collection simply lacks a universality of theme or talent.

Overall this collection is an interesting peek into contemporary Mexican writing, although it does seem the editors could have done a better job in selecting what to include.  Recommended to those with a marked interest in modern Mexican writing.

3 out of 5 stars

Source: LibraryThing EarlyReviewers

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