【预订】The Haunting of Alejandra
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作者V. Castro
出版社Random House Worlds
ISBN9780593499719
出版时间2024-01
装帧平装
定价118元
货号YB-86097
上书时间2024-06-28
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商品简介
A woman is haunted by the Mexican folk demon La Llorona in this “utterly terrifying and wholly immersive . . . story about generational trauma, colonization, systemic oppression, and the horror at the heart of motherhood” (Library Journal, starred review).
“Castro is one of the most exciting genre authors on the scene right now, and this might be her most powerful book yet.”—Paste
A POPSUGAR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
Alejandra no longer knows who she is. To her husband, she is a wife, and to her children, a mother. To her own adoptive mother, she is a daughter. But they cannot see who Alejandra has become: a woman struggling with a darkness that threatens to consume her.
Nor can they see what Alejandra sees. In times of despair, a ghostly vision appears to her, the apparition of a crying woman in a ragged white gown.
When Alejandra visits a therapist, she begins exploring her family’s history, starting with the biological mother she never knew. As she goes deeper into the lives of the women in her family, she learns that heartbreak and tragedy are not the only things she has in common with her ancestors.
Because the crying woman was with them, too. She is La Llorona, the vengeful and murderous mother of Mexican legend. And she will not leave until Alejandra follows her mother, her grandmother, and all the women who came before her into the darkness.
But Alejandra has inherited more than just pain. She has inherited the strength and the courage of her foremothers—and she will have to summon everything they have given her to banish La Llorona forever.
在这部“完全可怕且完全身临其境”的影片中，一名妇女被墨西哥民间恶魔拉洛罗纳 (La Llorona) 困扰。 。 。关于代际创伤、殖民、系统性压迫和母性内心的恐惧的故事” （图书馆杂志，星级评论）。
“卡斯特罗是当今最令人兴奋的流派作家之一现在，这可能是她迄今为止最强大的书。＆mdash;粘贴
A POPSUGAR < /i>年度最佳图书
亚历杭德拉不再知道自己是谁。对于丈夫来说，她是妻子，对于孩子来说，她是母亲。对于自己的养母来说，她就是一个女儿。但他们看不到亚历杭德拉已经变成了谁：一个与威胁吞噬她的黑暗作斗争的女人。
他们也看不到亚历杭德拉所看到的。 在绝望的时候，一个幽灵般的存在她看到了幻象，一个穿着破烂白色长袍的哭泣女人的幻影。
当亚历杭德拉拜访治疗师时，她开始探索她的家族历史，从她从未认识的亲生母亲开始。随着她深入了解家庭中女性的生活，她发现心碎和悲剧并不是她与祖先唯一的共同点。
因为那个哭泣的女人和他们在一起， 也。她就是拉洛罗娜（La Llorona），墨西哥传奇人物中复仇心重且凶残的母亲。除非亚历杭德拉跟随她的母亲、祖母以及所有在她之前的女性进入黑暗，否则她不会离开。
但亚历杭德拉继承的不仅仅是痛苦。她继承了先辈们的力量和勇气——她必须召唤他们所给予她的一切来永远驱逐拉洛罗娜。
作者简介
V. Castro was born in San Antonio, Texas, to Mexican American parents. She’s been writing horror stories since she was a child, always fascinated by Mexican folklore and the urban legends of Texas. Castro now lives in the United Kingdom with her family, writing and traveling with her children.
精彩内容
Alejandra
Philadelphia—2019
Alejandra sat beneath the square showerhead in their newly refurbished bathroom. Her feet touched the glass, and her head leaned against the tiled wall. The bathroom was the only place in the house where she could lock the door.
She felt numb as she imagined her mind and body crumbling, her every cell fragile as limestone. The image came to her of a skull, like the ones from centuries ago at the bottom of cenotes in Mexico. For the last four years, she had been that skull.
The doorknob jiggled.
“Mom, Mom, hurry up,” a small voice called for her over and over.
Just five minutes. One minute.
Please.
One second alone to breathe?
She looked toward the door. Her body trembled with the overwhelming desire to shrink to the size of the blood clots trailing down her legs.
Her period arrived like clockwork every month—the only thing she could predict after her tubal ligation. No more children. Never again.
She already had three children. Each birth had left an open wound where each of those pieces of flesh had been hacked off from her.
Since then, Alejandra’s inner world had felt like the scary part of death: They say nothing exists after the brain short-circuits to darkness and the heart squeezes out its last bloody tears. And that was her. For years she abandoned herself to be a willing sacrifice to please everyone around her, and now nothing existed within her anymore. Even her own hand was not a hand at all, but a blade she used to carve her heart for anyone who asked her for it.
Beyond the beaded veil of water on glass, a white form appeared in front of the towel rack.
Alejandra didn’t have her glasses or contact lenses on. It was likely just steam. Or was it her towel? She could have sworn she’d hung it on the hook behind the door. She glanced in that direction. The towel was there. She turned back to the rack, her neck popping from the quick movement.
The form lingered.
What could have been a towel now appeared to be a torn dress. It looked almost like a white mantilla. Her poor vision moved in and out of focus.
From the center of the silhouette rasped a voice so minute it might have come from her own mind.
“You want to end it. Let me help you.”
Alejandra whispered back with the sensation of hot water burning her throat, choking her: “No.”
The steam billowed with the water. It reminded her of the day she’d tried on wedding dresses.
A loud bang on the door made her head jerk and legs tense as they folded into her body. “Alejandra, it’s dinnertime. Are you coming down to cook? The kids are hungry.”
Her eyes broke from the amorphous figure to the door then back again.
The figure was gone.
“Give me a minute,” she called out as best she could through her tearful confusion.
“All right, but you’ve been in there over twenty minutes.”
Matthew’s voice brought her back to the present, the reality she wanted to escape from. His voice had a childish whine. His footsteps down the stairs could be heard through the door. She was relieved he would not be lingering in the hallway to question her further. She rose from the floor to rinse the blood from her legs. Her duties waited, leaving her no time to wallow. Now all she could think about was her hope that the children would actually eat what she cooked. Or would it be another mealtime of watching them spit it out? Every time they did, a feeling of rejection burrowed into her like termites.
Alejandra turned off the water and stepped out of the shower to dry herself quickly before they called to her again from outside her door. She couldn’t stand to hear any of them repeat her name. Her anger would flare up—aimed at herself for being weak. Sometimes her knees threatened to buckle when she thought of how she didn’t own a single thing in the world. She had no money of her own. No job. Her name was not even on any of the bills. Half her life lived as a shadow.
As she ran the towel down her legs, she noticed a slimy substance on the glass door where the hallucination had appeared. It’s probably from the children, she told herself. Alejandra put on sweatpants and a T-shirt, then wrapped her hair in the towel.
Before leaving the bathroom, she paused with her hand on the light switch. Something as deep inside her as the lining of her uterus told her what she already knew: What she had seen was not a hallucination. The presence of something or someone lingered in the heat of the room. She could tell by the way the mist parted and shifted.
Alejandra held no illusions of having any value in the world. But her emotional and mental instability felt monumental, like a large wave in the distance. She felt it gaining height and speed before it crashed onto the shore and pulled her into the depths of the unknown.
She switched off the light, then rushed to the kitchen. The staircase creaked beneath her feet with each step. She paused when she reached the bottom. The stained-glass window in the front door caught her eye. Fractured yellow-and-red light splayed across the floor in broken shards. Her maternal instinct told her to sweep them up to prevent anyone getting hurt by them. A darker instinct told her to use one of them on herself to no longer feel the pain.
But even if they had been real glass shards, would she have had the energy to grab one of them and plunge it into her flesh to end it all? She remembered the encounter in the bathroom and the imagined words, “You want to end it. Let me help you.” She placed both hands over her face as if to block the images and sounds her mind was conjuring that could not possibly be real. Only her pain was real, because it was always sitting on her shoulder.
From the kitchen, the voices of the children bickering and Matthew telling them to stop broke her thoughts of death.
You are still adjusting to the new house. Get a grip, she told herself.
Just three weeks ago, they had moved from Texas to a quiet and leafy suburb of Philadelphia. Matthew had gotten a new job that offered a salary and bonus that they could not turn down, and this large six-bedroom house was one of the many luxuries afforded by his new position.
She had tried to overlook the fact that she didn’t much like the neighborhood, the school run commute, or the repairs that would inevitably fall to her to oversee. But the move made sense for Matthew, and the space was more than most people could hope for. Be grateful. Don’t start, Alejandra, she told herself. It was meant to be a long-term, putting-down-roots kind of home. So why didn’t it feel like home?
She had brought just two things to remind her of her birthplace. One was the Frida Kahlo coffee table book she found at a secondhand store before leaving Texas. The cover was the painting of Frida in her white back brace and flowing whi
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