This doesn’t sound much like a narrative set in the future? Oh wait, there is an additional apocalypse: after a biological weapons spill caused by an earthquake off the island’s coastline, the reefs are dead, the ocean around them reduced to a polluted broth that can’t sustain animal life.Įnter the tentacular star of the novel: an ancient sacred anemone (or what’s left of it after the disaster), kept in a tank inside the apartment of its current guardian, the Yoruba practitioner and holy woman Esther Escudero, better known as Omicunlé.

The beginning of Tentacle is set in 2037 in Santo Domingo, and presents us with a post-apocalyptic Dominican Republic where the vast majority of the people can’t afford cars, flatscreen televisions, electric household appliances, or toys and shoes for their children, while a tiny rich minority controls everything through influence and bribery. It is also the sneakiest post-Lovecraftian book I’ve come across. As contemporary SFF in the category of climate fiction, it is easily readable as a commentary on present-day life and politics in the Dominican Republic and on the forces that threaten to destroy both it and, ultimately, all human life on Earth. Her short novel Tentacle ( La mucama de omicunlé, translated by Achy Obejas) contains dystopian, magical, and queer elements as well as political themes ranging from artistic and environmental to post-colonial issues, cleverly woven together into a very complex story for a book of 132 pages. Rita Indiana Hernández is a Dominican writer, singer/songwriter, and model.

Tentacle rita indiana chapter summary