"A terribly pale face, skeletal and eyeless, emerged from the shadow. Near skinless, what flesh it maintained hung tattered and decaying from its visage like ribbons. It's body unrevealed, the face drew nearer to the friar and its neck extended farther and father."

Steeped in folklorish wonder, and absolutely drenched in rich, beautifully detailed Mexican culture, Piñata is a vivid, intensely cinematic and extremely terrifying horror novel that delivers a totally fresh and unique take on the traditional possession story. The kaleidoscopic and decadent cultural influences strengthen this novel, turning it from a typical horror novel into something captivating and shocking. There is some real brutality here, some utterly gruesome and nasty depictions of horrors both of this world and supernatural. Never once does it hold back, Piñata instead, plunges us head first into the depths of Hell and forces us to reckon with some truly scathing, sickening and horrific scenes. This novel is nothing short of savage, it's barbaric, brutal, horrible, and yet, Leopoldo Gout writes with a beauty that goes unmatched.

This intense juxtaposition only heightens the shocking scenes and makes them linger in our brains for longer. Piñata is a punishing, unflinching and fiercely angry novel, one that's strangely and wonderfully female centric for something written by a male author. As with most horror novels, Piñata does have its slower moments, but here, as soon as the action begins, it becomes a picturesque and enrapturing beast. In a way, it's almost a blissful thing, it's striking and glorious just how wonderfully this is written. Unlike most horror novels, however, Piñata opens with a real bang, its prologue is perhaps one of the most harrowing, gut-wrenching and gripping openings to a novel ever penned. As a lover of a good, slow burning story of demonic rage, I greatly enjoyed my time with this one.

 

Absolutely drenched in gore and dripping from page to page in entrails, Piñata is an ambitious and entirely crazed horror novel, it's a dread inducing wild ride. Aside from the absolutely gorgeous prose, the strongest two points of this novel are the intensity of its horror, and, its characters. In fact, the characters are often the stand-out moments of this novel. Sure, one could argue that Piñata acts as a character study half of the time, but it still acts as a traditional horror novel too, just one that has some fun and fresh twists. It's a truly fantastic and memorable experience, to read this book, it's a delicately unfurling tale of terror, one that takes its time, but certainly, is worth the wait.

"It was grotesquely proportioned, a parody of human form. A skin of seashells jingled around its skeletal legs as it moved toward a small fluttering light where the small girl had been. The skeletal figure had no visible soul, an apparition. "