The Ear Is the Organ of Fear: Review of Mónica Ojeda’s Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun

Matthew Eatough Under Review:Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun. Mónica Ojeda, translated by Sarah Booker. Coffee House Press, May 2026. It’s fascinating to consider why cutting-edge developments within a genre often seem to cluster in particular places. What, for instance, makes the Scandinavian noir of the past 20 years so good? Is it something about the experience of living in Northern Europe amidst the recession of the social-democratic welfare state and the rise of right-wing extremism? Or does it have more to do with how Scandinavian noir presents Anglophone readers with an unfamiliar set of tropes and genre conventions capable of stirring new directions in Anglophone fiction? (This latter point is one that Roseanna Pendlebury makes about translated SF in her discussion of Bae Myung-Hoon’s The Proposal.) If noir is having a Scandinavian moment, horror would appear to be having a Latin American one. Over the past two decades, Latin American writers such as Mariana…