Review of Los Suelos by Hally Winters

Los Suelos

Authors: Multiple (anthology)

Genre: Electronic Literature

Published by Surface Dweller Studios
Reviewed by Hally Winters

Unearthing Los Suelos, CA

Written in scratch on the front webpage, the words, Los Suelos, CA sprawl across a photograph of what looks like California’s Central Valley on a hot hazy day, some might call earthquake weather. Los Suelos, CA is heralded by both emerging and established authors, and all proceeds benefit the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation. These stories are rooted in issues faced by California’s farmworkers, immigrants, and the Latinx and Indigenous communities, a handful of which are translated into Spanish by A.P. Thayer. Los Suelos, CA,  Surface Dweller Studios’ flagship project, is an interactive multimedia anthology that takes the reader through immersive gameplay exploring the fictitious town of Los Suelos, collecting stories and flyers from townies in an attempt to unravel the enigma going on in Los Suelos. 

A sickness lurks in Los Suelos, much like Valley Fever is conjured from the ground, this sickness comes from the soil located only in Los Suelos, and seeks to return one to it. J.J. Prado’s Lying / Garden begins, “I got yelled at frequently for lying on the ground when I had a perfectly sturdy bed to sleep on,” a story about a young boy whose parents habitually lie to him and his sister about everything, even the bed he sleeps on being made from “the strongest forests of California”. He finds solace in his older “punk-as-fuck” sister, the only honest person in his family, whose garden provides their family with fresh food, after years of eating food that supernaturally rots upon crossing the San Joaquin River into Los Suelos. She promises to never leave her brother, but when she does uproot and disappear, her vacancy comes “like a vibration. A little earthquake.” He is forced to reckon with the hole she left in his world in Los Suelos. 

Many of the stories are tied together with the sickness, coined Valley Flu in Excerpts From a Doctoral Student’s Closing Notes by O.F. Cieri. A cough and a desire to dig are the interlocking symptoms of this sickness. In jonah wu’s There is no Easy Way Towards Earth, the seventh section starts: “You think too much, someone on the killing floor told me. You identify too much with the cow,” a cutting story about an out-of-towner, Terrance Chen, who settles in Los Suelos and can’t seem to get out like many of the characters who find themselves in this town. He lands a job at Schaefer’s Slaughterhouse where cows say, “thank you thank you thank you” upon being shot by the bolt gun. If happy cows come from California, grateful cows come from Los Suelos: “Now I’m splitting the carcasses open, relieving them of their body, slipping the skin off. Like it’s a magic trick.” The longer Terrance Chen remains in town, the more his sickness mixes with his visions of A-gong, his grandfather who, were he alive, would never have wanted him to be the grandson he is. The sickness pulls him into Bolt Gun Hills, and then he’s eating dirt, the dirt spills over his fingers “like so much cool water,” and finally he’s in a self-dug shallow grave, speaking to the sky, “loud enough for [his] grandfather to hear.” 

Near the end of the game, after collecting the bulk of the stories from the anthology, the reader finds themselves at the drive-in theater next to the bottomless yawning hole that Hibiscus Bernard, Pastor and landowner, uses as a baptismal site. Much like Chelsea Bieker’s Pastor Vern in the novel, Godshot, Hibiscus has leaning power throughout the whole town and is seen as a force in almost every story in the anthology. Each person who encounters Los Suelos, CA will have seen a different version of it—as is the cornerstone to all anthologies—but Los Suelos, CA does something different. The diverse encounters with the anthology emulate the way a person might have a different encounter with a small city or town, depending on where you start, what you have, and where you go. This is how Brian Evenson’s Ruins of the Sun is so successful. It is a moment within the anthology that nods to the reader and the overall experience of the anthology in how each character experiences a different film portrayed in this story. Ruins of the Sun begins with the reader digging themselves deeper and deeper into the story of Karl Rogen when he first decides to make the journey toward Los Suelos: “Sensing a possible direction for my dissertation—lost French auteur rediscovered—I made a snap decision to make the trek to Los Suelos.” As Karl pulls into the seemingly haunted drive-in, the film begins sans introduction, and a team digs through the earth to find, “Behind the baked clay wall: the remnants of a lost civilization.” When the team decides to venture forth, a man, running across the drive-in theater with a face full of “holy wrath”—later identified as Hibiscus Bernard—rushes in and stops the film.

Upon further investigation into the mystery of the film’s origins and rapid censorship, Karl finds out that each individual had a “radically different” interaction with the film as each speaker had alternate audio playing. The reader is left with an ominous “Editor’s Note” that explains Karl Rogen’s disappearance after mailing in his account of the night he spent in Los Suelos. This story is the most reflective of the reader’s experience of descending into Los Suelos, CA and the process of hearing differing accounts about the sickness, the cows, the digging, and the church which comes at a well-timed end. You, the player and the reader, stricken with the town’s sickness, must then choose to be baptized into the deep hole that may or may not have a lost civilization, or choose to attempt leaving town knowing the difficulties all others have faced in trying to do so. 

Hally Winters is a writer living in Sunland, California. Hally was awarded the CalArts 2022 post graduate fellowship and will be teaching a creative writing course on California Literature drawing from her thesis, years of study into Californian history, and time as a docent at Bolton Hall museum of Sunland-Tujunga. She will also be attending Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop Summer ’22. Her work is forthcoming at Laurel Review and can be found at drDOCTOR, and more.

21 September 2022