In the latest novel from the Bram Stoker Award- and International Latino Book Award-winning author, Cynthia Pelayo, journalist Briar Rose Thorne wanders the halls of the vintage, South Chicago stone mansion she has just inherited from her mother. So deep is her grief that her lover and her best friend worriedly check on her, only to be pushed away. Briar is preoccupied with figuring out how to live without the mother who had been such an influential figure in her life—a highly intuitive, mystical woman with beliefs and practices that had challenged Briar’s skepticism.
Under the profound weight of loss, Briar begins to sense that she is not the only presence haunting the house, and as if that isn’t enough, she finds herself being stalked by a prolific serial killer whose gory deeds are front page news all over the city. Part crime thriller, part supernatural horror, spun with the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty, Vanishing Daughters is a deep dive into the dark side of Chicago’s history and folklore.
I had the opportunity to speak with Cynthia over Zoom. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Devi Bhaduri
We experience the story through the eyes of Briar as she is incapacitated by grief. She has moments where she doesn’t know whether she’s awake or asleep, and doesn’t remember her own name. I had wondered if the surreality of what she goes through was inspired by what it was like to grieve someone who had passed.
Cynthia Pelayo
This was the first book I wrote right after my father died. I remember struggling to write, and I remember thinking: I just have to write what I feel. And that’s why there’s such a heavy grief component. I grieved him very intensely. Days would go by and I would have no idea what was going on. I was super confused for a long time. I remember asking people, is this normal? And so many people were like, this is grief. It makes no sense and it’s difficult. One of my friends said, this is the torch you carry when you lose someone you love so much… My dad and I were very close.
Devi Bhaduri
I would imagine that as people with an artistic temperament, we feel things so deeply in a way that other people don’t, that perhaps we just notice more of it.
Cynthia Pelayo
I had to see my doctor at one point. He said, this is your body processing it all. He mentioned, you’re a creative person. There’s nothing I could prescribe to you. A lot of people would want to numb this. I don’t want to disrupt your creativity. I just want you to take care of yourself.
I think, culturally in the United States—after [my father] died, people were confused that I was so emotional. I’m Latina. I’m Puerto Rican. We’re very emotional. We put it out there. The muffling of emotions is so bizarre to me. I felt like I was shamed culturally for talking about these things.
Devi Bhaduri
Do you find it therapeutic to write horror?
Cynthia Pelayo
Yeah. Growing up, it was certainly therapeutic—watching horror movies—because I grew up in inner city Chicago. That was a big way to help me navigate everything that I was feeling.
Devi Bhaduri
At what point did you know that you needed to write about Chicago?
Cynthia Pelayo
When I was a journalist, I would write for community newspapers. I would write for Time Out Chicago… I started writing features and covering crime. But I stopped writing as a journalist after I covered a police shooting where a police officer shot and killed a young man. He was a guy from the neighborhood who we all knew. My dad knew this kid. Just released from prison and he wanted to turn his life around. His girlfriend was pregnant.
I remember hearing helicopters. I told my editor, I think there’s something going on in the nearby park. And she said, well go check it out. I took my dad to the park, and I see the young man, facedown. He had been shot multiple times by the police. My dad started crying.
On one side were community members shouting at the police. On the other side, it’s the police. I’m standing in the middle, and they could tell that I was about to start writing. The people in my neighborhood were like, you see what we see, and if you tell it any other way, you’re hurting us. And I couldn’t write the story. I just couldn’t. I called my editor and said, I’m done. I’m not writing this because I see what I see. I didn’t see a weapon on the young man. I don’t want to get into anything that’s going to hurt or harm me, or hurt or harm my community. I just couldn’t process. And this was before George Floyd. Before cell phone videos showing police officers acting not very nicely. I was terrified at what I was seeing.
I remember coming home and saying, I can’t write. I’m never going to write again. So I applied to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for an MFA in writing because I just kept wanting to write, and I couldn’t go back to journalism because I was so scared. I know now that I was dealing with the post traumatic stress of it all.
It was when I was admitted to SAIC, everything kept coming out Chicago. A lot of [my writing] at that time was gangs, law enforcement, and crimes. The magical and fantastical kept getting weaved in because it was too hard to write about it from a perspective that was too realistic. That’s where it all came from.
Devi Bhaduri
I thought it was interesting that Briar’s ancestors were basically French and Irish pioneers. Immigrants who built their own dream castle in Chicago. What a wonderfully grounded origin story for Briar’s family line. Do you write a lot about different immigrants in Chicago?
Cynthia Pelayo
Yeah. Even today, Chicago is a city of immigrant communities. I remember growing up and my dad saying, we’re going to go to Greektown today. We’re going to go to Chinatown. We would go to the Polish neighborhood. And everyone was speaking Polish at the restaurant and we would get pierogi. I remember that as part of my experience growing up. It was exciting. I grew up in a neighborhood that was German, Polish, Greek, and Latino. And it was wonderful.
I think that Chicago is so American in that there are all of these different immigrant communities. I’ve met people who are like, I’m a 3rd generation Chicagoan. I’m a 4th generation Chicagoan. I really like writing about these communities. Today, we associate Hispanics with being immigrants, but the Irish came here and they were not treated very nice. And the Italians came here, and they were not treated very nice. But they came here and established so many systems in the city, and built homes, and built businesses. Writing about these communities is my acknowledgement of how powerful Chicago is in terms of being an immigrant city.
Devi Bhaduri
Some chapters of Vanishing Daughters are spoken through the voice of a mysterious serial killer who calls his victims his sleeping beauties as he lays them into glass coffins. What was the genesis of that character?
Cynthia Pelayo
It was from talking to my editor. We had some discussions about pushing this story into a serial killer narrative. I was excited but intimidated. Could I do a serial killer? I’d spent a lot of time researching serial killers. I’d written true crime, but I’d never written from the perspective of a serial killer. I was scared to be in their head. And so I read Joyce Carol Oates’s Zombie. That is terrifying. If you want to read something wildly disturbing—it’s like a fictionalized version of Jeffrey Dahmer. I couldn’t even get through it because I was so upset. It was so scary. And that is how I started having that character develop in my head. It’s how I worked their thought process out, what their motivation is, and how they justified killing women.
Devi Bhaduri
I was absolutely gutted by the line, “Why do we fear the ghosts of women who were murdered? Why don’t we fear the thing that made them what they are?”
Cynthia Pelayo
There are so many folktales and ghost stories about women haunting spaces. The untranquil spirit tends to be a woman. Who created this ghost? And how did they die? You know the “vanishing hitchhiker” ghost, who was very often a woman. We don’t ask, how did this manifestation come to be? I feel like women who are murdered are destroyed twice. Their life is taken from them, and some of them are turned into ghosts and monsters who we fear in the night. I don’t think I’ve seen that question posed, and that’s what I wanted to pose through this book.
FICTION
Vanishing Daughters
Cynthia Pelayo
Thomas & Mercer
Published March 11, 2025
That is the question.