To live in Guayaquil, Ecuador is to be at the mercy of the tectonic plates under your feet. Nicole and Noa, the young women at the heart of Mónica Ojeda’s latest novel, Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun, run away from home on the day that a nearby volcanic eruption covers their city in ash. The friends are not afraid –– they’ve weathered more than a dozen such events –– but they take the eruption as affirmation that nature is calling them away.
Nicole and Noa are headed to the Solar Noise Festival, an annual gathering held on the slopes of Ecuador’s volcanoes. There, festivalgoers rave to the stylings of “sound artists,” who blend ancient Andean incantations with recordings of natural phenomena like thunderstorms and earthquakes. They rave for days on end, pushing their bodies beyond exhaustion, ostensibly to break through to a more primal, even supernatural, state of being. In between the narcotic-fueled mosh pits, rituals, and collective hallucinations, attendees whisper about a mysterious group known simply as “the disappeared” who attend each year and recruit from the crowds.
Ojeda writes each chapter through the first-person perspectives of other attendees whose stories collide with Nicole’s and Noa’s. We catch brief glimpses of what they are all running from, and a common picture emerges of chronic poverty and endless drug wars. Brothers and fathers are senselessly murdered in the night, and headless bodies line the streets by morning.
“You stop feeling the pain you inflict and that is inflicted on you,” one character says. “You look at your neighbor with distrust, you fear and hate what you fear.”
But what exactly is everyone seeking up in the mountains, exhausted and hungry, exposed to the harsh elements? Nicole says vaguely that she hopes to find “joy and pleasure,” or simply, “A life less governed by death.” She’s come to the wrong place.
With the introduction of each new character, Ojeda builds a creeping sense of foreboding. Nicole and Noa meet a couple who play the caja ronca, a version of an ancient drum filled with shrunken heads that “makes the sound of death.” During a performance featuring the titular Electric Shamans band, one of the musicians seemingly parts the frenzied mosh pit with his hands, inciting a bloody stampede. Solar Noise isn’t necessarily about the healing power of nature, but rather chasing oblivion.
Nicole is Ojeda’s most lucid narrator, and the only attendee to cast a skeptical eye over the festival leaders who have everyone else in their thrall. Despite the hallucinogenic drugs and chaotic circumstances, her chapters are visually orderly, with clear dialogue and legible thought patterns in complete paragraphs. By contrast, a drummer named Pamela’s perspective is presented in a single block of text across several pages, with no paragraph breaks between ideas or to distinguish dialogue. The effect is that of someone on drugs, offering a rambling stream of consciousness that is sometimes repetitive, and occasionally profound: “I remember that Noa asked me if I believed a voice could come from the past,” Pam says, “and that I told her when we are listening to storms, bird songs, animal howls, we’re listening to what has made sound for billions of years on Earth and that those are the sounds of the past for me, the ghosts that are in the present but that make you feel antediluvian or remember what you haven’t even experienced, wild stuff.”
Almost as soon as Noa arrives at Solar Noise, she starts behaving strangely. She’s moshing until she’s covered in bruises, walking backwards in her sleep, speaking in an animalistic language, and hearing thunder in her nightmares. “You’re giving birth to a new voice,” a shaman tells her. The question of who or what is behind that voice propels much of the novel’s horror elements.
Ojeda’s greatest strength is how she swirls heady questions––of birth and death on a continuum, of music and sound as the language of death, of whether silence or noise is better for the human spirit––throughout her narrative. It’s like being inside someone else’s trip and nodding excitedly along with them.
But it’s hard to parse exactly what answers, if any, Ojeda wants us to take with us when we go. If you are a person in this world, are your choices simply to live among men and be ruled by fear and hate, or to trek upwards and disappear?
Electric Shamans deals heavily in the difference between words and language. Through her characters, Ojeda posits that words are not enough to move beyond the trauma that these people have endured. True understanding is painful work. Ojeda does much of that work, bringing her characters right up to the edge of understanding one another. The phone line is finally open, but no one seems to be talking.
FICTION
Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun
By Mónica Ojeda
Translated by Sarah Booker
Coffee House Press
Published May 12, 2026
