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.
