Like V. Castro's 'The Haunting of Alejandra', which I also reviewed this month, this is a horror novel written from a Latinx perspective. Both look at colonialism, suppressed heritage and generational trauma, but they do it in very different ways. 'The Haunting of Alejandra' is very inwardly looking, a primarily psychological story of female empowerment. 'Piñata', on the other hand, is very happy to go there, both in location, starting out in Hidalgo, Mexico, where much of this story unfolds, and in style, with Gout getting physical and visceral with his horror, along with any psychological torment.

The lead once again is a woman of Mexican heritage who's living in the United States. This time it's Carmen Sánchez, an architect based in New York who's sent to Hidalgo by her company to oversee a project to develop an old abbey into a hotel. She's also a single mother of two girls, who travel with her because they're too young to remain behind in New York. Luna, a precocious eleven-year-old, is very open to their cultural heritage. Izel, a typical sixteen-year-old, really doesn't care. That provides an easy way for Gout to highlight cultural differences, with Luna embracing everything she sees with a passion and Izel ignoring it, preferring to stay buried in her phone.

If the girls highlight different approaches to culture, the location highlights heritage. The abbey is a historic building, the St. John the Baptist Cathedral, quickly described within the text as a "jewel of colonial architecture". The job at hand considers it important to maintain some of that style as the building transforms into its new use case. However, as we learned during a brutal prologue, its history didn't begin at that point. It was built with stones from an Aztec temple, destroyed for that purpose without any of the care or respect being employed for this newer change.

The prologue also introduces us to the piñata, which most know nowadays as a children's activity at birthday parties, some sort of hung contraption that pours out candy when broken in a game. Like so many traditional children's activities, it has a religious derivation, the Aztecs using them as part of their honouring of Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec god of sacrifice, on his birthday. Gout suggests that the decorated clay pots didn't originally contain candy but the blood and entrails obtained in ritual sacrifice and were called tlapalxoktli. When Friar Melquiades has native Nahua children break the tlapalxoktli open, he's calling for them to commit blasphemy against one of their gods.

When one refuses to do so, the friar kicks him to death in front of the others, and that prompts his sister, Ketzali, to take one of the tlapalxoktli and run with it. She finds a small crawlspace between a couple of chambers under construction in the new abbey and secretes it there, where it remains until this day, just aching to see the light of day once more. When that happens, because of course it does, an accident exposing the crawlspace and everything in it, Carmen, who's struggled with the job, not through lack of talent or drive but through her being seen by the workforce as both female and American, is blamed and sent back home to New York.

Only we know, because we're privy to so much more than the characters in the story, that it's made quite a connection with Luna, so open to her cultural heritage, and she secretly brings it back with her, the word possession having two very distinct meanings here. And so, while the prologue, set in colonial times during the ravages of the conquistadors, was horror to begin with, we move into the more modern aspect to this horror novel.

Well, I say only we know, but there are supporting characters who have some semblance of an idea as to what's happening and they grow in importance as the book runs on. Two of them are Nahua, a spiritualist named Yoltzi who sees beyond the veils of this world and a craftsman called Quauhtli, a friendly soul who attempts to connect Yoltzi with Carmen after the former sees what's attached to Luna. In particular, she sees tzitzimimeh, skeletal female figures who protected both the feminine and our entire species in Aztec mythology. Surprisingly, the third is a Roman Catholic priest, Father Verón, who becomes Carmen's closest friend in Hidalgo.

All these characters gets turns in the spotlight as Gout gives them the focus and they develop with panache. Yoltzi's role in proceedings was always pretty clear, but she mangles her first attempt to warn Carmen, coming across as a mad and superstitious peasant, meaning that she needs serious dedication to be able to make a difference. Quauhtli and Father Verón are clearly important from the first moment we meet them; but how is far less clear and their roles grew differently, though always believably, to how I expected. I appreciated all three.

I liked how talented and yet how flawed Carmen was. She's very well-drawn and, while Luna and Izel are very much there for the sake of the story, I appreciated how they grew too. Luna in particular is a fantastic character early on, a personification of the joy of cultural discovery, but, after she finds herself possessed, Izel, whom we ignore early on as easily as she would ignore us, finds her depths and grows as a character and a human being.

What else elevates this novel is how visual it is. 'The Haunting of Alejandra' could easily be turned into a film but it would work just as well as a radio play, because it's primarily character driven and monologue and dialogue would flesh that out well. This, however, demands our eyes, and so much of what grabs us and imprints itself on our minds would need to be adapted visually. As you might expect, some of it would need effects work, like the attack clouds of butterflies and the physically changing atmosphere around Luna. However, some of it, like the indoctrination scenes during the prologue, would merely need quality acting and thoughtful cinematography.

I've been thoroughly enjoying Silvia Moreno-Garcia's horror and horror-adjacent-looks at Mexican culture and I couldn't be happier that V. Castro and Leopoldo Gout are exploring similar territories in their own distinctive ways. Is it too early to suggest that we're in a boom time for Latinx horror? ~~ Hal C F Astell