Mystery Lights

June 17, 2024
Valencia’s accomplished debut collection portrays female characters in stark relief against unforgiving desert settings. In “The Reclamation,” a middle-aged woman attends a “self-actualization bootcamp” in the Coachella Valley. When her yurt mate disappears, she sets off on an increasingly dangerous walk across the “dried out and unwelcoming” landscape to find her. In the title story, Wendy arrives in Marfa, Tex., to supervise a marketing campaign for the reboot of a TV show only to find her efforts derailed by masses of young women devoted to an influencer who preaches “purity through chaos.” In “The White Place,” a standout entry, an unnamed artist reminiscent of Georgia O’Keeffe has an affair with a much younger ceramicist, who flatters her and her work in exchange for an introduction to her art dealer. In these stories, women are often in competition with each other; for instance, when the unnamed artist learns her lover has impregnated a 17-year-old, she exerts her influence to change the course of the younger woman’s life. Throughout, Valencia exhibits a mastery of plot and keen perception of her characters’s vulnerabilities. These alluring stories deserve a wide readership. Agent: Michelle Brower, Trellis Literary.

July 1, 2024
Women get lost in deserts and caves and find strange creatures waiting--including their new selves. Wellness retreats, guerrilla marketing campaigns, literary blogs, remote Airbnbs in Joshua Tree: Where there is glamour, there is terror in this self-assured debut collection. Although all Valencia's stories are engaging, those that follow gangs of easily influenced women are the highlights of this set, such as "Mystery Lights," about a marketing campaign in Marfa hijacked by an angry bewigged influencer and her followers, or the Black Mirror-esque "The Reclamation," about a desert wellness retreat with a cultlike leader. The gendered nature of the horror genre comes through in these stories' looming threats of sexual violence, such as in the opener, "Dogs," in which a woman's escape from a pack of dogs lands her in a strange man's locked SUV; "You Can Never Be Too Sure," in which a myth about a predator prowling around a college campus collides with the truth; or "Bright Lights, Big Deal," about working in the literary world pre-#MeToo. Girls disappear; some reemerge acting more animal. Some are lost forever to the forest. Aliens and ghosts hover close or fall away. In "Clean Hunters," a ghost-hunting couple's honeymoon is called into question when the wife can't feel spirits anymore. In "The White Place," a mysterious white orb hovers over a famous painter, her cook's pregnant daughter, and the man they both are involved with. Valencia investigates the threats lurking behind our wellness brands and cave tours, viral literary aspirations and ski bum college friend groups. Self-actualization, she says, is sometimes not a desert meditation retreat--it may be a cave-dwelling flesh-eating creature. These stories show us there's not all that much in the way between them. In 10 eerie stories, Valencia leans into the horror and grit under a shiny world.

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