Latinx Horror Reads
By Jacs Rodriguez
In honor of the overlap of Latinx and Hispanic Heritage month and October, the spookiest month of the year, I’d love to bring you all some incredible books that live at this intersection. What follows is just a small fraction of some new and brilliant Latinx horror! Allow me, your local Latinx spooky guide, to take you through some of my favorites that I read this year! Approach with caution, they are all incredible and will make you both very afraid and very emotional.
This Thing Between Us by Gus Moreno
Sorry, actually just stop reading this blog post, read this book, and then come back. Because oh my god. One of the best horror books of all time, full stop. The cover is brilliant, the absolute gut wrenching grief is brilliant, the characters and story are brilliant, the horror elements are brilliant. Moreno is a treasure. This book starts out in the city and takes you to the rural, snow-covered forest, complete with mysterious gateway in the woods, and throughout this you follow Thiago as he grieves his wife’s sudden and tragic death. It’s so so gorgeously written, so emotional and tender, and so incredibly scary. Make this your next read!
The Devil Takes You Home by Gabino Iglesias
How far would you go for your family? How many red flags in the form of extreme violence, dangerous distrust, and dark magic would it take for you to abandon all hope? Mario faces all of this and more in a desperate bid to save his family and his marriage. Ghosts, the devil, underground tunnels of dubious origin, drugs, and a whole lot of Spanish (something I absolutely LOVED about this book), this book made me cry so many times! Truly an achievement, soooooooooo scary, extremely gross and violent, but also so beautiful? This book made Gabino Iglesias the first latinx Bram Stoker winner for Superior Achievement in a Novel!! One of my favorite books of the year, I just want to give it a big hug.
The Vampires of El Norte by Isabel Canas
If you’re a gothic fan, this one is for you. A great follow-up to her Rebecca-esque debut, The Hacienda, this vampire novel is a beautiful, atmospheric gothic, with a beautiful love story at its center. Canas’s style is a stand-out of historical horror, and this supernatural western is no exception! I love a good horror novel where the setting is its own character, and Canas is great at this. Like a Guillermo del Toro film that you can carry around. Plus it has vampires, I don’t even need to talk up that part of it, it speaks for itself.
Loteria by Cynthia Pelayo
This super fun book of 54 short stories includes a story for each card in a set of loteria cards. Super creepy, each of these stories packs a punch in just a few pages. I wish I could tell you what my favorite was but there’s so many good ones! This collection proves Pelayo’s adaptability and the strength of her style. Pelayo is the first Latinx Bram Stoker Award winner for Superior Achievement in Poetry and has a ton of other work to follow this up with!
Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez
Mariana!!! The spooky Argentine queen of my heart!!! Everything she writes is perfect!! This one is long, I know, a huge departure from her quick and easy short stories, but it’s worth it! A family drama, a cult pursuing immortality at all costs, some time jumps, mysterious deaths, A ROAD TRIP!? It has sooo many fun elements, and is as terrifying, eerie, and heartbreaking, as her work always is. It is brutal, it is strange, it is addictive, it is carefully crafted, it is just great. Every time I finish something she has written I simply want to eat it, she’s so good.
Our Shadows Have Claws (An Anthology)
Why stop at one Latinx author when you could have 15 of them!! This YA anthology of Latin American monster stories is an absolute joy. Packed full of so many monsters you’ve probably never heard of, this anthology is a really wonderful celebration of a variety of cultures and locations, because what culture doesn’t have its own cryptic or cautionary tale? In this collection you’ll of course find a lot of horrible, horrible, scary things, but you’ll also find beautifully created characters, incredible style, and just a great time.
There are so many other books that would have made this blog post way too long, so don’t let this be the end of your Latinx horror journey! Read these, cry it all out, and go back for more.
