Stories by Lena Valencia, reviewed by Jennifer Nessel
MYSTERY LIGHTS, (Tin House)
As the sun set across our campsite in Rocky Gap, Maryland, I turned to my friends, who had taken great pains to convince me to join them, and asked, “How easily do you think someone could sneak up on us here?” This question hadn’t occurred to the others, who chided my dramatic reaction and my lack of camping experience. They assured me, however dismissively, that the surrounding campsites were filled with families or couples on weekend trips. Perhaps it was the towering oaks or the stygian darkness, but for the rest of the night, I was uneasy about the trip. “It’s not crazy,” I responded in desperation and shoveled another marshmallow into my mouth. “Anything can happen!”
A woman fearing for her safety is perhaps too common to be easily dismissed, especially one isolated by the wilderness. It’s an image etched into the cultural fabric, a fear that underpins the entertainment industry’s parade of crime shows, podcasts, and documentaries. It is the prompt for a recent internet poll: Would you rather be alone in the woods with a bear or a man? The question is never whether a woman should be threatened in the woods, but rather at what time, what place, and by what entity.
But where does this image of an isolated woman in the wilderness leave us in an age of modern, feminist independence? That is the question that Lena Valencia poses in her debut story collection, Mystery Lights (Tin House, 2024). Named as one of the “Most Anticipated Debut Books of 2024” by Debutiful, Mystery Lights is a collection of ten stories following women, old and young, isolated across a variety of unfamiliar landscapes, from a yurt in Coachella Valley to a roach-infested apartment in New York. Rather than following a chronological order, these stories, set primarily across the backdrop of the American Southwest, are connected by the perilous and otherworldly.
In Mystery Lights, female characters who would otherwise excel in their educational or professional fields are instead faced with danger. College student Lily navigates social and romantic relationships with classmates who downplay the threat of campus serial kidnappers. Aspiring gossip blogger Julia is willing to win an audience by any means necessary, even betraying her best friend. Wendy, head of a TV show marketing campaign, struggles to maintain authority when she comes under attack by an influencer and her angry followers. Throughout these stories, Valencia’s dynamic and fast-paced voice illuminates dark aspects of a post-feminist society in which women must compete to survive misogyny in educational, corporate, and personal settings.
Alongside its stunning visual prose is the collection’s firm perspective on the isolation faced by women and girls in the modern age. In “Vermilion,” the main character, Nancy, listens to a true crime podcast with her husband, Tom. What constitutes casual listening for Tom is troubling for Nancy, whose daughter, Esme, went missing years prior. Rather than be safeguarded by her husband, Nancy must swallow her grief to make her husband more comfortable. “She’d told him, time and time again, that it was fine, his listening to these stories […] She was done letting the grief control her world. She would listen to the podcast, and she would be fine.” It is a powerful example of the responsibilities women often carry when navigating confusion, frustration, grief, and otherness.
One of the most quintessential stories about isolation is “The White Place,” which follows an unnamed Painter, her handyman and lover, Mike, and his seventeen-year-old girlfriend, Sandra. Both the Painter and Sandra are fraught with pain and confusion brought on by Mike and both look to the skies for answers only to find a giant, glowing orb hovering above them. Is it a source of understanding? A means of escape? Does it even matter? Maybe not, since at least one of the women is “sure that anything would be better than this.”
Despite the collection’s frequent predator-prey dynamic, Mystery Lights also features women and girls who transform into monsters when faced with no alternatives. “Trogloxene” tells the story of Max, a young girl who undergoes a mutation after losing her family during a guided tour within a cave in Quicksilver Springs, Arizona. Before being lost, Max looks like the perfect daughter, with “shimmering golden hair” and “crystal green” eyes. However, after she is found, Max is different,“more angular.” She eats raw meat at the dinner table and chases rabbits as the rest of the family sleeps in their remote Airbnb. This physical change is frightening to Holly, Max’s older sister and the narrator of the story, who must come to terms with the part she played in her little sister’s disappearance. “Trogloxene” questions whether such a transformation — from perfect girl to mutant creature — could be beneficial if it means that the girl becomes powerful and independent. It also forces the reader to examine the same phenomenon within the modern woman: whether independence comes at the cost of traditional beauty and acceptance, and why such a transmogrification is seen as a tragedy.
Perhaps the collection’s most prototypical woman-turned-monster is Pat, the middle-aged protagonist of “Reclamation.” After closing her vintage clothing store, Pat sets out on a Glow Time Retreat in the Mojave Desert, hosted by Brooke Soliel, a business guru and podcast host. Pat is initially cynical toward the retreat, which was a gift from her husband, but quickly takes to Brooke’s guided process of “self-actualization.” When her roommate, another skeptic, walks off into the desert, Pat’s journey to reclaim her friend quickly takes a predatory turn. “Reclamation” forces readers to reckon with the reality of self-actualization, the brute force of change, and the violent potentiality inside every woman.
Valencia calls on readers to examine the very monsters that walk among us, challenging the nature of beauty, independence, and connection in modern womanhood. As I read Mystery Lights, I was reminded of my walks at night, the flinching tendency to turn around and pull one side of a headphone up, to gaze back at the glow of an orange street lamp, and to wonder if something or someone is watching me. After reading Mystery Lights, I now believe there’s a very real chance that I have nothing to be afraid of, for I may be the creature to fear.
Jennifer Nessel studies fiction at the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers Program. Their writing can be found at Marias at Sampaguitas, Defunkt Magazine, and elsewhere. In 2020, their fiction was nominated for a Pushcart prize. Jennifer lives in Washington D.C. with their partner and two (very large) cats.
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