Annihilation: Homecoming and Hyperviolence in Fernando Vallejo's Our Lady of the Assassins and Mario Mendoza's Satanás Ángel Díaz Miranda Hollins University Abstract: This article argues that Colombian novels Our Lady of the Assassins (1994) by Fernando Vallejo, and Satanás (2002) by Mario Mendoza, tend towards the hygienic abolishment of what is arguably an ineffectual order by making their main characters the only (marginal) members of society that are able to challenge their cultural order and subvert it. In addition, it will also focus on various themes that are present in both works: the fragmentation of the self, the loss, search, and replacement of God as “Law”, and violence as annihilating act. Keywords: repatriation – hygienic drive – Vallejo – Mendoza – violence To arrive again and again, with the same sense of unreality at the damned horrors of the evening. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Robert Louis Stevenson In “A Rather Singular Strike”, the first chapter of Targets of Opportunity, Samuel Weber describes an intrinsic relationship between Odysseus’ repatriation and violence. The author expounds on book XXII of The Odyssey, where Odysseus looks for the perfect target to commence his act of vengeance against the men that pursue his wife, his riches, and his kingdom. The hero desires to recuperate, and reintegrate into, his home. Weber explains how the violent scenes in the book accentuate a moral dilemma. In order for Odysseus to return home, to his wife and his son, a great act of violence is required. In this way, the champion will be able to recuperate what is rightfully his, and in the process become who he really is (Weber 9). In other words, violence is the imperative of homecoming. It is by returning home, and through violence, that the returning hero is able to show his true self, be reinstated, and assume, again, the role of the patriarch. In The Odyssey, the purifying ritual is pushed towards a moral extreme since violence becomes justified even though it I