Abstract Fernando Vallejo's 1994 short novel, La Virgen de los Sicarios,1 is a story ofhatred, alienation, and violence. It is narrated through the notions of love, sex, religion, and patriotism. Vallejo tells the story through the protagonist and narrator, F emando, a man in his 50s, who returns to Colombia to die—or more accurately, hoping to be killed. What we ultimately read, however, is not his death, but his departure from Medellin, his hometown. Along the way, we learn of his hatred of Colombia and of essentially all things and people, except for his two male teen lovers. Both lovers are highly practiced killers, and unlike F emando, they are both dead by the novel's end. One might characterise the narrator's hatred as bordering on pathological; however further study suggests grounds for understanding the emotion as a substitute for (in so far as it is the next closest thing to) love, a sentiment that is foreign to Fernando, the gay male narrator.