Down the Rabbit Hole

In this remarkable short novel, written as Mexican drug violence exploded in 2006, Villalobos endows his child narrator, Tochtli, with a chillingly authentic voice. Tochtli grows up motherless in a palatial hideaway, alone with his tutor and forever repeating the mantra to behave like a man, not a faggot. Everyone in the hideout is mute, as if their tongues had been cut out, and all have indigenous Aztec names; Tochtli means "rabbit," and Yolcaut, the name of Tochtli's drug lord father, means "rattlesnake." The hideout has its own zoo, with lions and tigers that dispose of corpses, and because Tochtli wants a pair of pygmy hippopotamuses for this zoo, he is permitted to go to Africa in search of them. When the two animals, dubbed Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, are unexpectedly converted from potential playmates into taxidermic trophies, Tochtli has a transitory moment of insight and maturation.