Ingrid hasn\u2019t heard from her childhood best friend and homoerotic teenage obsession in years. When she receives an invitation from Mayra, her once lucrative, rebellious inspiration, to come join her for a weekend getaway at a house in the Everglades, how could she not accept?\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a story that\u2019s been told before, but Mayra grabs the classic teenage queer awakening concept by the throat and asks a slightly different question: how would you react if your queer awakening called you years later and invited you away?\u00a0<\/p>\n
Nicky Gonzalez throws us into a fever dream that is reminiscent of Mona Awad\u2019s gothic fairytale Rouge. Mayra and Ingrid\u2019s friendship starts in Gonzalez\u2019 own home-town of Hialeah, Florida, filled with Cuban-Americans. We\u2019re breadcrumbed with anecdotes from over the course of their friendship, from their intense introduction to their estrangement. The relationship between Mayra and Ingrid feels familiar to every young queer woman, but Gonzalez twists it to the extreme. How do these relationships look in a completely new, eerie environment after you\u2019ve spent years no-contact? Gonzalez throws in the surprising presence of Mayra\u2019s boyfriend, Benjii, who makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck. It\u2019s hard to tell if it\u2019s because he\u2019s creepy or because you\u2019re a little bit in love with Mayra. For Ingrid, it\u2019s both.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0The novel is classified as \u2018horror fiction\u2019 but the horror takes a backseat whilst Mayra and Ingrid\u2019s relationship drives the plot. The horror elements are rather easy to miss for a majority of the novel, but if you look closely, the hints can be picked up on.\u00a0 Ingrid is our narrator, and whilst she isn\u2019t explicitly unreliable, she often momentarily yanks you from the sultry fever dream of the Everglades, occasionally questioning the allure of her surroundings to remind you that everything is not always how it seems.<\/p>\n
If you go into Mayra expecting a queer horror novel you\u2019re bound to be disappointed. Rather than reading Mayra as a horror novel, given the atmosphere or the explicit danger in the last sections of the novel, the horror elements work more as a metaphor for the relationship between Mayra and Ingrid. There is an exploration of control in the novel as it explores toxic friendships and queerness, wrapped up in a labyrinthian house away from humanity, with no cell service and only the presence of each other (and Benjii, occasionally). This is where the true horror lies. Mayra explores the allure of danger through a Floridian fever dream. When comfort becomes deadly,how do you know when it\u2019s time to leave? Gonzalez doesn\u2019t let you look away as the lines between separation, love, and queerness blur in this sickly, swampy landscape.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ultimately, Mayra isn\u2019t your typical queer horror novel, and its open ending leaves readers wanting more. With Ingrid\u2019s world altered by her experience in the house, it\u2019s hard to tell what comes next. Mayra isn\u2019t about horror or ghosts; it\u2019s about the ghosts people carry, of friends and lovers and that one person who cracked you open and then left you to calcify. It\u2019s about what happens when they come back.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Gonzalez doesn\u2019t give us clean answers or tidy genre conventions. Instead, she gives us rot disguised as romance, intimacy laced with dread, and a queer narrative that feels more like a bruise than a breakthrough. You won\u2019t leave Mayra scared in the traditional sense, but you might be relieved that you didn\u2019t send your first toxic homoerotic lover a post-Birdcage \u2018I miss you\u2019 midnight text.<\/p>\n
Mayra was published by Scribe Publications.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ingrid hasn\u2019t heard from her childhood best friend and homoerotic teenage obsession in years. When she receives an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":38564,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[64,63,457,134],"class_list":{"0":"post-38563","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-books","11":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38563"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38563\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}