Reviewed by L.J. Gouveia
MAYRA
Nicky Gonzalez
Penguin Random House
240 pages
Right off of Lockhart’s town square, you step off the sidewalk next to Loop & Lil’s Pizza, through a door and down into a steep stairwell. Its walls are festooned with garlic braids, vampire art, and creepy old sepiatone photos, leading you down into Haunt Happy Books. This small but stylish basement bookstore is devoted exclusively to horror. A vintage TV console in the middle loops classic horror movies. It’s a smart, fun mix of goth and kitsch, and a perfect respite from the still-summery Texas heat.
Just in time for Halloween, I roamed around in there and found Nicky Gonzalez’s almost hypnotic debut novel, Mayra. It deftly blends horror, women’s literary fiction, Latina fiction, and Florida Southern Gothic. It’s essentially a horror novel that also delves into the complexities of a decades-long friendship between two women who bonded as teenagers in a rough Cuban neighborhood in Hialeah. (Gonzalez herself hails from there as well.)
The protagonist and narrator, Ingrid, stayed in Hialeah all these years and eventually lost touch with her high school best friend Mayra, who fled for a more glamorous life in the Northeast. One day Ingrid gets a call to join her estranged yet beloved old friend for a weekend reunion of sorts at a big old house way out in the Everglades.
This being a horror novel, with its fairly ominous cover illustration of a door in a darkened swamp opening into bright red light, we of course already know this will not go well. But Gonzalez paints such an endearing portrait of Ingrid and her beguiling, longlost bestie we go along for the ride anyway.
On the road there, nothing goes quite right and nothing is quite what it seems. That sets a gradually more and more unsettling, surreal, foreboding tone that carries through the whole book.
Much to Ingrid’s dismay, Mayra is already there with her boyfriend Benji. He’s the caretaker of the house, which also becomes something of a character all its own. Not only does Benji shift the dynamic and spoil some of the girl-trip vibe, his eagerly pleasant hosting is subtly but instantly off. We know right away he’s not quite all he seems, either.
Nevertheless, Ingrid gladly settles in for a much-needed languid weekend of decadent dining, drinking, and reminiscing that keeps her usually more street-smart self from realizing just how trapped she is, figuratively and literally. Without internet or a cell signal or any nearby tethers of civilization (not even a TV or radio), the house—and by extension, the book—take on a slowly spiraling warp of time, memory, and even the physical reality of the house itself and the surrounding forest and swamp.
Of course that’s also unmistakably symbolic of the women’s decades-long friendship, with all its odd terrain and twists and turns, as well as Ingrid’s own psyche. She has to come to terms with who she was, who she still is (and isn’t), and who she wants to be. And all of this is refracted through the lens of her complicated friendship with Mayra. It also explores the deep pull of the past and the seductive dream of what life could be and maybe should be. Gonzalez so perfectly renders all the power, tenderness, drama, intimacy, and conflict this kind of friendship entails. It is the true heart of the book and its most dazzling feat.
There are elements of horror, but it’s not a typical horror novel—don’t expect blood and guts or some kind of Sunshine State version of The Shining—it’s more of a slow boil. Gonzalez maintains a gradually increasing suspense even as Ingrid reminisces and ponders all this heavy friendship stuff, mostly unaware of the full extent of the danger we knew she was in before she even picked up her car keys. It’s not until she finds a diary from a long-ago guest that she finally starts to piece things together. Some might find that pace a bit leisurely and drawn out, but I contend it’s essential to establishing the otherworldly, increasingly nebulous sense of time, and a seeming languor that’s actually slipping into something quite dark, on more levels than one. Gonzalez makes it all work, for the most part.
For me, the only slight flaw is that I’m not quite as enamored with Mayra, though maybe that’s deliberate on Gonzalez’s part. For all the evocative meditation on the nature of friendship, I don’t really get the iron grip Mayra still has on Ingrid. Many of us have had a high school friend like Mayra—the impossibly cool girl you’re so flattered and amazed to have as a new BFF—only to discover she’s really a narcissistic asshole, and things inevitably unravel. We’ve learned to let go of our Mayras in a way that Ingrid doesn’t seem fully able or willing. She’s still intensely devoted to Mayra, even while quite astutely calling her out on some things, in that cutting way only someone that close could. Mayra deserves it—and often gives as good as she gets.
One could joke the book’s real horror is having to spend so much time up close with Mayra and Benji. They’d be right at home in the most obnoxiously boho-hipster Airbnb in south Austin’s SoCo. I don’t recall Gonzalez outright saying whether Benji has a man-bun and some crypto, but I’m utterly certain he does. I would’ve barely been able to stand these two for a whole dinner, let alone a bizarrely ever-lengthening weekend. But that’s part of the payoff of horror, isn’t it—we get to reassure ourselves that we’d have known better than this and we’d have hoofed it right outa there way sooner.
Don’t get me wrong. Mayra still has so much going for it. Gonzalez’s writing is edgy and beautiful at the same time, dreamy and pondering without plodding. Ingrid is so richly nuanced and lionhearted you can’t help but relate and root for her. As mistakenly alluring as she finds Mayra, it’s rather ironic and poignant that the character who really draws us in and keeps us there isn’t Mayra, it’s Ingrid herself. She’s the ride-or-die BFF you’d want with you when shit goes sideways in the swamp. –L.J. Gouveia
…I had a life somewhere far away that I’d have to return to, but the thought was gone as quickly as it came, like forgetting the nonurgent chore you meant to do the moment you entered a room to do it. As the night went on, the outside world broke off in chunks and floated away, until it felt like the living room, the house, and the woods immediately surrounding it were all there was to the universe. There was laughter, maybe even singing. The last thing I remember was Mayra’s dry hand against my damp forehead pushing back my bangs, her laughter as though through a shitty ceiling speaker, and her voice saying, “She’s out.”
–Nicky Gonzalez, Mayra
Author website: nicky-gonzalez.com