Nefando

A techno-horror portrait of the fears and desires of six young artists whose lives are upended by a controversial video game, from National Book Award finalist Mónica Ojeda.

Six young artists share an apartment in Barcelona: Kiki Ortega, a researcher writing a pornographic novel; Iván Herrera, a writer whose prose reveals a deeply conflicted relationship with his body; three siblings, Irene, Emilio, and Cecilia, who quietly search for ways to transcend their abuse as children; and El Cuco Martínez, a video-game designer whose creations push beneath the substrate of the digital world. All of them are connected in different ways to Nefando, a controversial cult video game whose purpose remains a mystery. In the parallel reality of the game, players found relief from the pain of past trauma and present shame, but also a frighteningly elastic sense of self and ethics. Is Nefando a game for horror enthusiasts, a challenge to players' morals, or a poetic exercise? What happens in a virtual world that admits every taboo?

Unsparing, addictive, and perverse, Nefando takes us to the darkest corners of the web, revealing the inevitable entanglement of digital and physical worlds, and of technology and horror.

Publication date: October 24, 2023

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.25 

Page count: 184 pages

ISBN: 9781566896894

Translated from the Spanish

Mónica Ojeda (Ecuador, 1988) is the author of the novels La desfiguración Silva (Premio Alba Narrativa, 2014), Nefando (Candaya, 2016), and Mandíbula (Candaya, 2018), as well as the poetry collections El ciclo de las piedras (Rastro de la Iguana, 2015) and Historia de la leche (Candaya, 2020). Her stories have been published in the anthology Emergencias: Doce cuentos iberoamericanos (Candaya, 2014) and the collections Caninos (Editorial Turbina, 2017) and Las voladoras (Páginas de Espuma, 2020). In 2017, she was included on the Bógota39 list of the best thirty-nine Latin American writers under forty, and in 2019, she received the Prince Claus Next Generation Award in honor of her outstanding literary achievements.

Sarah Booker is an educator and literary translator. Her translations include Mónica Ojeda’s Jawbone, Gabriela Ponce’s Blood Red, and Cristina Rivera Garza’s New and Selected Stories, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, and The Iliac Crest. She has a PhD in Hispanic Literature from UNC-Chapel Hill and is currently based in Morganton, North Carolina where she teaches Spanish at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics.

A BOMB Magazine Editors' Choice

A Southwest Review Must-Read Book of 2023

"Cerebral, sensual and unapologetically scatological, this techno-horror tale is obsessed with ‘the internal conflict between man and beast, intellect and instinct, life and death.’”

—Gabino Iglesias, The New York Times

"Ojeda makes a convincing case that it’s not the machines that created the nightmares, but the humans. When we open our laptops, when we stare into our little screens, all that monstrousness we unconsciously fear about ourselves, words and images we worry will remain forever uploaded—all that human terror—looks back at us."

—Rhian Sasseen, BOMB Magazine

“Nefando deserves attention for not only the polished craft of Booker and Ojeda, but its insistence on staring directly at genuine horrors—both online and in the real world—and unflinchingly asking why, if we won't tolerate these problems in one space, we allow them to be perpetuated in the other.”

—Cory Oldweiler, The Star Tribune

“Ojeda’s work bubbles from this need to write the unspeakable—to write not just of horror, but of the moments of desire, pleasure, or love that might lie within it.”

—Anna Learn, Full Stop

"Nefando isn’t for the faint of heart. It confronts the evil, unspeakable aspects of human nature, refusing to turn away its lucid, dissecting gaze.”

—Sébastien Luc Butler, Foreword Reviews

“Like the fictitious Nefando itself, this is a work for voyeurs, searchers, escapists, doomscrollers. At times I feared this book, yet I couldn’t put it down. At some point you sense it coming to life, and what began as recreation quickly turns to compulsion. Even at the final page, you fear the book will go on without you.”

—Daniel Peña, author of How to Look Away

“In Nefando, Mónica Ojeda compels us to bear witness to the most vicious form of sexuality as it intersects with the perversion of family and the trauma of a broken childhood. The experience of pain goes beyond what can be said, but Ojeda persists in naming it with language as poetic as it is crude. This choral, fragmented novel masterfully reveals and weaves together the darkness of our time.”

—Gabriela Ponce, author of Blood Red