Mónica Ojeda

Set in a near-future Ecuador, Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun follows Noa and her best friend, Nicole, as they leave the violence and decay of Guayaquil behind to attend Solar Noise, an experimental music festival held in the remote Andean highlands near an active volcano. Amid psychedelic music, ritualistic dances, and a gathering of young people searching for transcendence, the festival becomes a space where the boundaries between the physical and spiritual worlds begin to dissolve. Noa has a personal reason for making the journey: she hopes to find her father, who abandoned her when she was a child. But after arriving at the festival, she begins experiencing strange transformations, speaking in a voice that seems not to belong to her. As Nicole tries to understand what is happening to her friend, both young women confront their histories of abandonment, violence, and emotional pain. Blending speculative fiction, psychological horror, Andean mythology, and experimental music culture, Ojeda explores the search for belonging and the relationship between trauma, identity, and transcendence. The novel’s hallucinatory atmosphere evokes a world where ancient spiritual traditions collide with futuristic subcultures, offering a haunting meditation on the desire to escape the past and imagine a different future.