Haunting Reads with Latine & Hispanic Roots
Celebrate Latine & Hispanic Heritage Month with us by diving into this collection of epic, award-winning titles that will grab you from the first page. Full of Hispanic and Latin roots, culture, and even folklore, these picks are sure to make way to your shelves this month.
The Mexican board game of Lotería is a game of chance—similar to bingo. However, in Lotería instead of matching up numbers on a game board, players match up images.
There are 54 cards in the Lotería game, and for this short story collection you will find one unique story per card based on a Latin American myth, folklore, superstition, or belief—with a slant towards the paranormal and horrific. In this deck of cards you will find murderers, ghosts, goblins and ghouls. This collection features creatures and monsters, vampires, werewolves and more. Many of these legends existed long before their European counterparts—passed throughout the Americas via word of mouth, collected just like the tales the Brothers Grimm. These are indeed fairy tales—Latin American fairy tales—but with a horrifying slant.
In this genre-deyfing, award-winning thriller, a desperate father journeys into the criminal underworld to save his family—but soon begins to lose sight of himself and what he set out to do.
Buried in debt due to his young daughter’s illness, his marriage at the brink, Mario reluctantly takes a job as a hitman, surprising himself with his proclivity for violence. After tragedy destroys the life he knew, Mario agrees to one final job: hijack a cartel’s cash shipment before it reaches Mexico. Along with an old friend and a cartel-insider named Juanca, Mario sets off on the near-suicidal mission, which will leave him with either a cool $200,000 or a bullet in the skull. But the path to reward or ruin is never as straight as it seems. As the three complicated men travel through the endless landscape of Texas, across the border and back, their hidden motivations are laid bare alongside nightmarish encounters that defy explanation. One thing is certain: even if Mario makes it out alive, he won’t return the same.
The Devil Takes You Home is a panoramic odyssey for fans of S.A. Cosby’s southern noir, Blacktop Wasteland, by way of the boundary-defying storytelling of Stephen Graham Jones and Silvia Moreno-Garcia.
For childhood friends Gabe, Xavier, Tavo, Paul, and Bimbo, death has always been close. Hurricanes. Car accidents. Gang violence. Suicide. Estamos rodeados de fantasmas was Gabe’s grandmother’s refrain. We are surrounded by ghosts. But this time is different. Bimbo’s mom has been shot dead. We’re gonna kill the guys who killed her Bimbo swears. And they all agree.
Feral with grief, Bimbo has become unrecognizable, taking no prisoners in his search for names. Soon, they learn Maria was gunned down by guys working for the drug kingpin of Puerto Rico. No one has ever gone up against him and survived. As the boys strategize, a storm gathers far from the coast. Hurricanes are known to carry evil spirits in their currents and bring them ashore, spirits which impose their own order.
Blurring the boundaries between myth, mysticism, and the grim realities of our world, House of Bone and Rain is a harrowing coming of age story; a doomed tale of devotion, the afterlife of violence, and what rolls in on the tide.
Cría cuervos y te sacaran los ojos: Raise crows and they’ll take out your eyes.
Since the age of seven, Christian has been under the thumb of a curse. He reads its dark signs everywhere: in his bedridden mother’s wilting plants; in his brother’s estrangement; in his father’s eager fists and glassy stare. He reads it in his nightmares, in Stockton’s soundtrack of sirens and gunshot. Above all, he reads the curse in the mirror, watching himself “turn” into the crow his father always predicted he’d become.
Maddened by the city’s heatwaves and his own unthinkable desires, often high and drunk, Christian rips through his neighborhood, desperate to escape not only the city but the monster of his pain. But even when he leaves, the curse follows. Can Christian ever be absolved? Or is he condemned to be consumed by the same violence as his father?
And I’ll Take Out Your Eyes is a defiant, shattering portrait of self-discovery in the face of violence, mental illness, and other dark inheritances. In a lyric, circuit-bending onslaught of ragers and laments, A. M. Sosa delivers a redemptive story—and an unforgettable debut.
A threatened mother and a relentless detective collide when a series of murders awaken something long buried in the New Mexican desert in this mesmerizing novel of literary horror, perfect for fans of Carmen Maria Machado and Stephen Graham Jones.
A mother’s love is the oldest curse
Fortuna Miércoles has finally moved her family to a better neighborhood across the Rio Grande, desperate to outrun the curse that’s stalked her bloodline since her greatest grandmother crossed the desert with a cactus thorn splitting her throat. But burying a family’s violent legacy—or her own haunting secret—isn’t so easy. Twenty years ago, girls and women vanished into the Albuquerque night, their bones later unearthed on the mesa. The so-called Reaper was never caught. Now, beneath the dormant volcanoes called the Sleeping Sisters, the killings have begun again, and they’ve called forth something in Fortuna that she has long fought to keep buried…
Detective Jeanette Palacio has spent decades promising justice to the ghosts of her murdered cousins—alongside the memory of the other women she couldn’t avenge. When a new body turns up in Fortuna’s backyard, both women are pulled into a dangerous, ancient plot. Are the Sleeping Sisters awakening—or has someone in Fortuna’s family set a trap?
Inspired by true events, The Sleeping Sisters begins as a taut mystery shot through with myth and a Chicana-Indigenous reimagining of the legend of the headless woman—but by its cataclysmic end has spiraled into a fevered, feral hymn to motherhood and a mesmerizing portrait of trauma and the monstrous bargains we make to protect those we love.
Author of Piñata, Leopoldo Goût’s latest horror novel Rooted is a “a blood reckoning” (Marlon James) where one woman’s return to Mexico City digs away the layers of her forgotten past and the Aztec gods she awakened.
There’s nothing wrong with Aurora.
A successful art lawyer, she has returned to Mexico to celebrate a recent campaign for the repatriation of stolen artifacts–in particular a mysterious statue of an Aztec god, The Flayed One.
But Mexico City isn’t as she remembered. Nothing is. Elements of her past hint at darkness and power, and reality begins to crack and warp the streets.
There’s nothing wrong with Aurora.
As Aurora’s sanity unravels, she must pry apart her family’s secrets and accept the simplest of truths: The Flayed One cannot stay buried.
“It wields all the destructive fury of a flayed god determined to avenge centuries’ worth of colonial devastation and greed…”-Cynthia Gómez, Ignyte-nominated author of Muñeca
Other Books by Leopoldo Goût
Piñata
Something followed us home. It crawled in with our prayers, slipped into our beds, watched from mirrors, waited in water, and learned our names.
Gathering chilling work from some of today’s most acclaimed Latiné voices, this horror anthology moves through haunted households, brutal landscapes, sacred spaces turned dangerous, and bodies claimed by forces both ancient and intimate. The dead murmur behind locked doors. Bones rebuild themselves under merciless suns. Love becomes a doorway for demonic hunger. Blood, devotion, and memory intertwine as the past presses back with teeth.
Something Followed Us Home is an unnerving, visceral, and impossible-to-shake collection that proves that what is carried forward does not remain quiet, and what follows us rarely leaves without taking something in return.
Featuring stories by: Agustina Bazterrica, Isabel Cañas, Gerardo Sámano Córdova, Zoraida Córdova, Ann Dávila Cardinal, Mariana Enriquez, Carolina Flórez-Cerchiaro, Xochitl Gonzalez, Leopoldo Goût, Ananda Lima, Juan Martinez, Mónica Ojeda, Daniel José Older, Cynthia Pelayo, Lilliam Rivera, Diana Rodriguez Wallach, Alex Segura
1877, Pernambuco, Brazil: Raised in a deeply religious household, Madalena knows Dante’s Inferno by heart and fears her mother’s reaction as much as she fears God. When she falls pregnant with a child conceived in sin, her mother issues a threat: marry or surrender the baby. Madalena is confident that the father, the dashing Leandro Neves, will do right by her and propose. But just as she is about to tell him about the baby, a violent storm sends their carriage careening off the road.
Madalena awakens in Leandro’s sprawling, secluded home, under the care of the mysterious and larger-than-life Doctor Lobo. Leandro is there . . . but he is no longer the charming poet she knew. He’s silent. Obsessed. Always watching.
Strange perfume haunts a locked room. Pages vanish from books. Jewels lie untouched in a forgotten wardrobe. And mirrors begin disappearing after Madalena sees something–or someone–ghastly in the reflection.
Leandro is unraveling. Doctor Lobo may be hiding something even darker. Trapped in a decaying house of secrets, Madalena must uncover the truth before the men around her destroy her, and before the hell she fears becomes the one she’s living in.
Julieta Vanterroso was born with fangs, a beautiful little monster in a family that knew exactly what to do with monsters. Her grandmother, Julia Vanterroso, has built an empire out of blood: the Sanguina factory, the Highblood Club, the old Carnival families, the politicians, the servants, the bodies that can be drained and paid and forgotten. In Barranquilla, the Vanterrosos do not hide what they are. They dress it in lace, teach it to dance, put it on a float, and call it tradition.
Now Julieta is meant to become Queen of Carnival. She must smile, dance, read the Bando, marry the man chosen for her, and step into the future her grandmother has prepared since the day she was born. But as Carnival approaches and the Vanterroso family begins to turn on itself, bodies appear where they shouldn’t, old rituals start to fail, and the women around Julieta grow hungry in ways even blood cannot satisfy.
By the time Carnival crowns its queen, Julieta will have to decide how much of herself she is willing to lose to become what her family has been waiting for.
Drawing from Afro-Caribbean spiritual traditions, Highblood transforms Barranquilla Carnival into a landscape of blood, spectacle, and ritual, where women inherit hunger like a family heirloom and survival depends on who is willing to devour whom first.
In this award-winning horror novel from Latin America, a community of women and children–and one man–fight for survival in a harsh and terrifying Cuban rainforest where the gods require appeasement through brutal sacrifice.
The forest is a terrifying, hungry god with harsh rules and a ravenous appetite that must be fed. In this ruthless world mothers raise their children as food, a cannibalistic system of offerings and retribution from which there is no escape. For women, survival depends on becoming mothers. They must reproduce even as their children grow up trapped between life and death, heaven and hell. Such is life on the hacienda.
To ensure the forest’s protection, its inhabitants must renounce their rights and any trace of hope. Among them is Benedicta, a cruel and prolific “whelp” producer, now past her prime. The timid Lazaro, the community’s only man, fears the forest, Benedicta, and the memory of his mother. Benedicta’s daughter, Ifigenia, lives on borrowed time as she anticipates the forest’s call. She loathes everyone, including the feral “she-dog” Ananda, whose fury has given way to madness. And then there’s Romina, a hardened newcomer to the forest who may just break the cycle.
A Caribbean-flavored novel of gothic horror from one of Latin America’s most exciting young writers, What the Forest Devours is a macabre examination of what women must sacrifice to survive in a society with the power to destroy them at any turn. With its spine-tingling allegories, impressive imaginative vision, and a dazzling translation courtesy of acclaimed translator Kevin Gerry Dunn, English language readers can experience the dazzling masterpiece that has swallowed the Spanish literary world whole.
Growing up in a city wracked by political violence and a home where she’s more likely to receive a beating than a meal, Minerva Treviño’s cowardice has kept her alive for sixteen years. But even she has a limit. Hungry and desperate, she musters enough courage to run away and take a job as lady’s maid to a wealthy widow who supports the deposed viceroy.
Minerva is happy serving Encarnación del Valle. She has food in her belly and the safety of a warm house lit by magical chispa. Why should she care who runs the country or how her employer affords the magic?
When the viceroy sweeps back into power, Minerva retreats with her gleeful employer to the family’s mountainside stronghold to wait out the inevitable rebel slaughter. At la Casa de las Gardenias, Minerva faces new threats in the haughty servants and cruel, scheming del Valles.
But the living residents of the house are the least of her worries. As Minerva quickly discovers, the ancient estate is home to forces far older and more bloodthirsty than anything she could have imagined.
Two days before Christmas, Alba drags Carmen to the mall. There, she runs into the formidable “widows.” The pair approach Alba and put an evil eye on her. Her nose starts to bleed, which is how Alba knows. Then, on Christmas Eve, Alba disappears, and Diana and Carmen collapse from the pain in their bellies, where a deep gash splits their purging stomachs. As the tensions the three women have long held in explode, they’re finally forced to confront the terror that connects them.
Haunting, cinematic, and strikingly visceral, Don’t Leave Her Alone is an incisive exploration of motherhood that interrogates women’s struggle for autonomy and identity, and ultimately forces the question: What does it take to finally break free?
In this deliriously inventive twist on The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Argentine powerhouse Diego Muzzio conjures a haunting story of shattering war trauma and the disturbing proximity of sanity and madness in his English-language debut.
In 1920s Edinburgh, war veteran Dr. Edward Pierce develops experimental therapies to treat mentally ill patients whose cases have been rejected by conventional psychiatry. One night, he receives a visitor who asks him to take on an unusual new patient: David Bradley, an engineer who was sent to inspect the conditions of a lighthouse on a remote island in southern Argentina. The sojourn was a disaster, and he returned completely mute, his body overwhelmed by a single compulsion: to swim and swim, in any environment, to the point of total exhaustion.
Bradley’s fragmentary diary reveals how this rational, disciplined man became the deranged individual brought to the sanatorium. Full of bizarre details and echoes of macabre events, it guides Pierce in his studies of his patients, propelling him into scientific terrain that grows increasingly grotesque.
With an ingenious structure that creates doubling and uncertainty at every turn, The Eye of Goliath is a masterfully tense novel that unites classic gothic atmospheres with disturbingly modern psychological horror.
