In her scarifying fiction debut, translated by Frances Riddle, Ecuadorian writer and journalist María Fernanda Ampuero offers a baker's dozen stories that stab at the heart of the very idea of domestic tranquility. Fierce and tender, pained and vicious, Ampuero's miniatures focus on women facing violence and exploitation, as her (mostly) young protagonists survive abusive fathers, brothers and neighbors, well-organized sex traffickers, armies of cockroaches and other pervasive threats of violence that might gut their lives open at any time.
"I say yes because I've always said yes to men," one narrator says, after performing for an abuser's pleasure in the most squalid of settings. That declaration suggests this lean collection's prevailing tone of dazed resignation in the face of everyday terrors, but Ampuero's most memorable stories edge toward a bravura horror reminiscent of the most brutal work of Joyce Carol Oates. The opener, "Auction," in which a girl discovers men stop touching her when she's covered in the guts of gamecocks, stands as a sort of mission statement about the feminist uses of gore, and several other stories are pointedly splashed in menstrual blood. (Plus: creepy twins and copious incest!) Most of Cockfight's voices come from Ecuador's poor, but Ampuero sets two stories--one told by an international tourist watching workers bleach a resort swimming pool, the other by a wealthy woman whose friends get drunk and try on the maid's clothes--on the other side of the class divide. They're caught in sick cycles, too. --Alan Scherstuhl, freelance writer and editor