Conclusion: The Terror Machine
As I have shown in these contemporary Mexican narratives, we have three very distinctive forms of the monstrous figure of the werewolf. On the one hand, the explicit and recognizable figure in Felipe Montes’ El enrabiado, which embodies the despair of a generation that found itself faced with the economic paradigm shift from the welfare state model to that of orthodox economics. Secondly, the ghostly figure of the werewolf/wolf in Bibiana Camacho’s novel, where it represents the vaporous embodiment of the terror of violence and disappearances in Mexico during the last two decades of brutally increasing economic violence in the form of increasing social inequality in terms of the violence unleashed by the “war on drugs.” Finally, the awakening of the bestial side of a middle-class girl from Monterrey when she too comes into contact with drug violence.
These novels work together to construct a narrative with Gothic elements that describe and denounce the series of violent transformations that Mexico has been experiencing since the 1980s, when the change in the country’s productive paradigm began, which would later be deepened by milestones such as the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 and, in particular, the beginning of the “war on drugs” in 2006. In these narratives, the figure of the werewolf serves as a vehicle for expressly violent forms: hopelessness, uneasiness, feelings of vengeance, and the anguish of not knowing where the disappeared people are, “consumed” by a war apparatus unleashed between drug traffickers and the government. This appropriation of a typically Gothic monster not only functions in the case of Montes’ novel explicitly as a figure that opposes the “progress of history,” as Moraña points out regarding the function of monsters in literature, but also coincides with a general reappropriation by popular culture of topics and themes from Gothic literature to reflect on the economic, political, and social changes in the country. As Blake and Monnet point out:
It is no coincidence, we contend, that the characters and plots of the historic Gothic have come to dominate popular culture over the course of the past thirty years. For as neoliberalism has come to dominate the ways we live, work, think, interact and introspect, harnessing the epistemological uncertainty of the postmodern project in service of its aims, the gothic’s ability to give voice to the occluded truths of our age has resulted in a global proliferation of gothic, and gothic-inflected, cultural artefacts. (2017: 1)
In the same way, these narratives delve into the resources of the Gothic and in particular into the figure of the werewolf, in its strict sense and in its most ghostly postmodern sense, to find answers to questions that, as in the investigation of the protagonist of El Lobo, seem to have no answers or at least, are not easy to articulate.