Not for the faint of heart, Coffee House's 'Nefando' takes a disturbing look at youth

For horror fans, October's the most wound-erful time of the year, but scary content isn't scarce the other 11 months, either.

Entertainment that frightens, disquiets and generally unnerves is big business. This Halloween sees prequels for both "The Walking Dead" and "Pet Sematary," in addition to the usual franchise sequels. Indie darling A24 is even embracing the world of online horror legends called "creepypasta," a genre whose influence is still noticeable almost a decade after its popularity peaked. Ecuadorean writer Mónica Ojeda's English-language debut, "Jawbone," in Sarah Booker's highly lauded translation, featured teenage girls crafting their own online legends. And this month brings Ojeda's second English-language novel, "Nefando," in another vibrant translation by Booker.

The Barcelona apartment shared by the novel's six young adults feels as if it could have sprung from one of the many iterations of creepypasta — a portmanteau of creepy and copypasta, the term for viral, copy-pasted content — that lurk on YouTube. It's a space where both the art created and the lives lived are such uncomfortable spectacles that you often find yourself wondering why you keep staring at the horror on display. Its depraved and unsettling vision of our world's very real problems is like something the Marquis de Sade might have pitched to David Cronenberg.

The novel shares its title with the name of a video game that hacker/pickpocket El Cuco creates with his roommates and fellow Ecuadorians, the Terán siblings Cecilia, Emilio and Irene. The apartment's other two residents, Kiki and Iván, act as beta testers for the game before it's taken offline by authorities due to its illegal content, which includes pornographic videos the Teráns' father made of his children.

The game, as Iván describes it, was designed for voyeurs with a "morbid curiosity," but his description of how it was played — "you read, you searched, you spied, you feared" — also evokes how we interact with social media. Nefando's creation is described by El Cuco, Kiki and Iván as they discuss day-to-day life, their perceptions of each other, their relationship to art and the ambivalence existing in the outside world. The Teráns largely exist in the background, though each graphically relates their childhood ordeals.

Kiki is the most intriguing of the six. When she's not crafting her erotic novel, the 23-year-old hyper-intellectual discourses on the link between our tolerance for violence and the gory iconography of her Christian upbringing in Mexico City, or rails against the "repulsive elitism" of copyright laws. Iván, the other Mexican in the apartment, is driven to desperate acts of physical abuse by the feeling that he is two people, with different gender orientations and desires, trapped in one body.

Despite its extremely disturbing subject, "Nefando" deserves attention for not only the polished craft of Booker and Ojeda, but its insistence on staring directly at genuine horrors — both online and in the real world — and unflinchingly asking why, if we won't tolerate these problems in one space, we allow them to be perpetuated in the other.

Cory Oldweiler is a freelance writer.

Nefando

By: Mónica Ojeda, translated by Sarah Booker.

Publisher: Coffee House Press, 184 pages, $17.95.