With her new horror anthology, Something Followed Us Home: Tales of Latiné Horror, Chicago based editor/author Cynthia Pelayo expects to broaden the horizon for her prolific work in a debut edition from the relatively new but internationally well-connected Simon & Schuster imprint, Primero Sueño. It is a splendid collection of seventeen stories that will expand not only Ms. Pelayo’s reach, but also the reach of other talented contributors, including several familiar names within the Chicago literary scene.
The book’s title and brilliant cover design provoked a question in my mind the moment I picked up the book. What makes the anthology’s horror Latiné horror? Is it just setting and characters, or is there something more? Context laden symbols—a keyhole, a skull, withered flora and fauna rendered in vibrant colors—punctuate a jet-black cover, creating contours of a hidden face, a mysterious being who peers at the reader from the blackness. Is it a beast? Or maybe a tribal warrior mask with Frida Kahlo party skirts for cheeks? Delicious possibilities surely lay inside. A pair of green eyes with matching lashes seemed to summon me into the strange world of Latiné horror in a way that reminded me of the butler at Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s door during a visit to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. “This way please,” the eyes blinked. “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” my inner voice cautioned, but it was too late. My expectations were soaring as I opened the book, but would the anthology be able to shed light on my question regarding Latiné horror?
The Mexican author Brenda Lozano addresses the essence of Latiné horror head-on in a brief but masterful foreword that is as entertaining as the best of the stories within. While scores of other writers have laid Latin literature’s penchant for magical realism at the altar of Catholicism, I found Lozano’s explanation of where ghosts reside uniquely enlightening. Anglo-Saxon ghosts, she says, reside in spaces between the rational and the paranormal, while more Catholic-based Latin cultures suspend logic altogether and permit the two to exist contemporaneously. She has fun connecting that to the concept of crossing borders as one of several culturally based sources of terror; and she informs the reader about ghosts from around the world including paying homage to Hamlet’s father as the original ghost of Western literature. No rules involved and no pressure to overthink the matter, but Lozano delivers a cotton candy dissertation on differing existential understandings; and in doing so puts forth rational theory on the influence of culture in determining the things that creep us out. Readers who usually skip over forewords are advised to make an exception.
Several stories in the collection feature protagonists who confront the possibility that they themselves may actually be the devil. Or if not exactly the devil, at least the incarnation of a spiritual malignancy of some kind. In “Blue Flowers,” Agustina Bazterrica wields the repressed memory of a child’s unspeakable act like a club. Isabel Cañas takes the reader inside the mind of a she-wolf who was conjured by a witch in “The Hand that Feeds,” and in Leopoldo Goût’s “Luz y Fer,” twin halves of the devil are reunited after showing up at a series of disasters. My personal favorite from the collection, “My Boyfriend” by Gerardo Sámano Córdova, features a slightly different version of that split persona. In it, a gay man falls for a Jekyll-and-Hyde serial killer who’s described quasi erotically as a soft-serve swirl of angel and demon. Can’t lick one without the other; however, in an odd twist, as their love grows, the demon withers away, and the man is forced to take on the killing on behalf of the angel half that remains. Without the demon, the throuple is doomed, of course, but the two of them still speak when they bump into each other at Sunday brunch.
Supernatural events layered poignantly onto colonial or immigrant experience is another common theme in the collection. Editor Pelayo’s contribution, “El Jíbaro de Puerto Rico,” is an example. We meet a girl who lives in an isolated Eden with only her grandfather and a menagerie of animals for companions. Life is difficult and they are poor, but the girl is content in a paradise. Pelayo’s adept use of time travel lends a pre-civilization feel to the place and she stuffs the sorry history of Puerto Rico’s abuse at the hands of the United States into the ghost of the meek child. In “Mechanical Servants, LLC,” Juan Martinez crosses a smaller timespan to recount a perennial graduate student’s descent into madness. As the protagonist writes to a lost girlfriend, his entire life shrinks to tiny toys sold online in plastic clamshell packages by a company in Elgin, Illinois. Diana Rodriguez Wallach closes the collection with a straight-up vampire tale about an immigrant family of ghouls who make their way around the country feasting on the characters found at teenage suicide funerals. It’s even more gruesome than it sounds, but wittily funny and a legitimate commentary on contemporary American societal dysfunction. Graduate school is the setting for Ananda Lima’s “Specter,” another of my favorites, as well. The protagonist is a writer who is haunted by a spirit that must be fed words that she must continually create. The plot owes a lot to Little Shop of Horrors, but set in an MFA program that reminds me of Mona Awad’s novel, Bunny.
Within the collection there are nine more equally deserving stories that go unmentioned in this review. Every one of them will be some reader’s favorite, so to Ann Dávila Cardinal, Zoraida Córdova, Mariana Enriquez, Carolina Flórez-Cerchiaro, Xochitl Gonzalez, Mónica Ojeda, Daniel José Older, Lilliam Rivera, and Alex Segura I offer my apology for not squeezing their stories in as well as my sincere congratulations for having been selected for this beautifully crafted anthology.
Something Followed Us Home: Tales of Latiné Horror has something for every horror short story fan. The book will be released simultaneously in Spanish and English, and a significant amount of the content is offered in translation, whichever of those options the reader chooses.
FICTION
Something Followed Us Home:
Tales of Latiné Horror
By Cynthia Pelayo
Atria/Primero Sueno Press
Published September 29, 2026
