Hurricane Season (Spanish: Temporada de huracanes) is the second novel by Mexican writer Fernanda Melchor, published in April 2017[1] by Literatura Random House.

[5] It focuses on the events surrounding the murder of the Witch of La Matosa, an impoverished fictional town in Mexico through which Melchor explores violence and machismo in Mexican society.

[16] She lived in a large dilapidated house where she held parties with the village youth, to whom she paid money in exchange for sexual favors.

The next day, Munra finds Luismi in the courtyard observing a small object covered in blood that is buried in a hole in the ground.

[16] Brando could not put up with his mother's strong religiosity, so he joined the group of older boys in town, with whom he began to drink and take drugs at the Witch's house.

Melchor came up with the idea for the story after reading a crónica roja (crime report) about the murder of a woman whose body was discovered in a canal in rural Veracruz.

Melchor initially planned to investigate the crime further and transform it into a non-fiction novel similar to the style of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (1966).

However, she chose not pursue the non-fiction style due to the dangers of traveling and researching in areas with a strong presence of drug trafficking organizations.

[18] The long chapters are made up of a single block of text without paragraph divisions and are written in a colloquial language that incorporates characteristics of the Mexican oral tradition.

[18] Melchor decided on the novel's style and structure after writing the first two chapters, which spontaneously took on the form of an intense narrative without paragraph breaks.

Melchor was in a "very pessimistic" state of mind while writing the novel due the violence, misogyny and homophobia plaguing the region at that time.

[9][23][12] The Spanish writer Jorge Carrión, writing for The New York Times, included the novel in his list of the best Ibero-American books of 2017 and described its style as "virtuous, oppressive.

[29] These same characteristics were praised by Bolivian writer Edmundo Paz Soldán in his review for La Tercera, in which he wrote that within Melchor's prose "the profanity, the desire to name the obscene and the scatalogical, are revealed in all their explosive beauty."

[21] Meanwhile, Dalia Cristerna, writing for El Universal, described the novel as a testimony to the violence, corruption and poverty experienced by marginalized sectors of society.

[16] The review in the British newspaper The Guardian, written by Anthony Cummins, described the novel as "intense and inventive" and as "a brutal portrait of small-town claustrophobia, in which machismo is a prison and corruption isn't just institutional but domestic."

Cummins referred largely to the violence of the plot, which he called "near-dystopian", principally in the treatment received by women in relation to the powers reserved men.

The review particularly praised the "two virtuoso chapters" which focus on Norma and Brando as underscoring "the depth of feeling and disquieting intensity Melchor is capable of."

Dennis also proclaimed that it was precisely Melchor's "willingness to explode a violent act into multiple perspectives, to look at it again and again from different angles (perpetrator, bystander, accomplice)" that made the novel "feel weightier than most contemporary fiction.

"[32] The review of The New York Times, written by Julian Lucas, called the novel "impressive", referring to the murder of the Witch as an event that Melchor "captures in language as though distilling venom.