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.

In Jawbone (Mandíbula), Ecuadorian writer Mónica Ojeda explores the disturbing intersection of adolescent desire, female friendship, violence, and fear. The novel opens with Fernanda, a wealthy teenager who has been kidnapped and imprisoned in a remote cabin by her literature teacher, Miss Clara. As the circumstances surrounding the abduction gradually emerge, the story reveals the intense and unsettling relationship between Fernanda and her best friend, Annelise, whose shared fascination with horror, mythology, and the macabre has drawn them into increasingly dangerous territory. At their elite bilingual school in Guayaquil, Annelise leads a group of girls in elaborate rituals devoted to a fictional deity they have created. Their games blur the boundaries between imagination and reality, intimacy and cruelty, fascination and obsession. Meanwhile, Miss Clara struggles with her own psychological disintegration, haunted by her dead mother and the pressure to maintain control. Drawing on horror fiction, internet creepypastas, mythology, and literary theory, Ojeda constructs a multilayered narrative that captures the volatility of adolescence. The novel examines how young women negotiate power, sexuality, identity, and belonging in a world where affection can become possessive and fear can transform into desire. Its unsettling atmosphere challenges readers to confront the darker possibilities of growing up.