The Iliac Crest

A labyrinthine excavation of forgotten Mexican women writers, this Gothic novel illustrates how gendered language can wield destructive power.
On a dark and stormy night, two mysterious women invade an unnamed narrator's house, where they proceed to ruthlessly question their host's identity. While the women are strangely intimate - even inventing a secret language - they harass the narrator by repeatedly claiming that they know his greatest secret: that he is, in fact, a woman. As the increasingly frantic protagonist fails to defend his supposed masculinity, he eventually finds himself in a sanatorium. Published for the first time in English, this is a Gothic tale of destabilised male-female binaries and subverted literary tropes.