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The exhilarating English-language debut from celebrated Ecuadorian author Gabriela Ponce, Blood Red centers the female body in a radical exploration of desire, choice, and consequences.
In a torrent of stream-of-consciousness fragments, the unnamed narrator of Blood Red recounts the aftermath of her failed marriage in explicit, sensual detail. She falls in and out of love, parties with her friends, skates around the city at night, does a lot of drugs, and gives in to her impulses. Her internal monologue is punctuated by bouts of trypophobia, an obsessive cataloging of holes that empty, fill, widen, and threaten to swallow her entirely. Blood courses through her every encounter from periods, fights, accidents, wounds, sex, streaming to and from her holey fixation. Blood is a vibrant reminder of her physicality, a manifestation of her interiority, a link to memories and sensations—until its abrupt absence changes everything.
Provocative and raw, Blood Red is a fierce portrayal of a woman navigating the gray—or red—zones of her uncertainties and paradoxical urges. A subversive grappling with what it means to wrest power over one’s body, revels in the narrator’s autonomy to make choices and face the outcomes, no matter the scale.
“The strength of excess and overconsumption. The accelerated, irregular heartbeat of prose that attacks from all angles and doesn’t let the reader breathe, basking in its own exquisiteness.”
—José Andrés Bayas, Radio Cocoa
“The narrator and protagonist of Blood Red… is wild. She bleeds, she runs, she separates herself. She bites, she gets drunk, she rollerskates, she sleeps around, she gets pregnant… in sum, she lives. Following her through caves and bodies is an exercise in risk.”
—Xavi Ayén, La Vanguardia
“Blood Red could be characterized by its multiplicity and a profoundly provocative spirit were it not futile to put a label on it. Those who make it to the end (which is not difficult, as it is a dizzying, captivating read) will find that everything can be doubted, especially in relationships. This impulse puts the novel in the trend of bold, fascinating contemporary narratives by Latin American women writers.”
—Gabriela Toro, La periódica
“Before all else it is an exploration of femininity, of the female body as a metaphor of living and savage nature, of menstruation, of insanity, of desire, of sex—of this hole that is the uterus, amputating maternities.”
—Ariana Basciani, The Objective