RaveThe NationSometimes a novel can rip open [the] darkness ... Mexican novelist Emiliano Monge—the ripped-darkness phrase is his—has done exactly that with his newly translated novel, Among the Lost. But illumination is not without its own complications: To read Among the Lost is to be trapped in, to borrow another Mongian phrase, a \'cage of light\'—a Goyaesque picture of the Central American exodus, and the horrors some migrants pass through along the transit routes in Mexico ... The reader is basically guided through a humid hellscape of backstabbing, plotting and counter-plotting, and wanton disregard for human life. If that sounds sensationalist or overwrought, the fictional elements are grounded by the much scarier snippets of actual testimony that Monge gathered from Central Americans as he traveled the migrant trails while researching the novel. In brutal detail, their testimonies describe a pervasive sense of panic.
