Read This: The Burning Ember Mission of Helldorado
The Burning Ember Mission of Helldorado, Manuel Arenas’s latest collection, is a rich, bloody Southwestern gothic shaped by Christian folk beliefs, Mexican legends, and older, indigenous myths. And evil. Plenty of evil.
Arenas’s Helldorado is an accursed city in the Arizona desert, a nexus of criminal intentions and black magic. It nurtures a misbegotten mission dedicated to darkness, flagrant devil-worship, criminal gangs, a monstrous pregnancy, shape-shifting, murder, and necromancy. Its inhabitants live, die, and transform at the whim of supernatural forces.
Despite its desert setting, it is not a place in the sun.
***
“The Burning Ember Mission of Helldorado” evokes the weird moodiness of a seventies horror movie, in all the best ways. It introduces us to the town and its dark secrets, and to the sorcerous figure of Adrian Zwartenberg, who exacts a terrible vengeance on an outlaw and his girlfriend who dare to cross him.
“Zwartenberg the Necromancer” gives us another example of the wizard’s depravity as he violates the sanctity of the grave.
“Lupe Scries the Mirror Black” and “Altagracia’s Lament” are poems describing two sides of a terrible family curse and the cost to break it.
“Dimas Akelarre: The Brujo of Navarra” introduces a new wizard who has taken a particularly dark path to join the unholy.
“Féretrina” is a modern folktale about a young Mexican woman, her quest for a better life in the United States, and the coyotes who shatter her dreams. She exacts revenge with the aid of both the folk-Christian and Aztec aspects of the goddess of death–and becomes something else in the process.
***
With heady prose and evocative illustrations by Mutartis Boswell, The Burning Ember Mission of Helldorado creates a mood of dread and wildness. Behind it all lurks the deep well of regional folklore and its distinctive terrors. By lacing his work with references to a host of native and syncretic gods and monsters, Arenas provides us with the means to explore the mythology behind his stories.
I strongly recommend you do.