10 Thrilling and Chilling Horror Novels to Kick-Off Latine and Hispanic Heritage Month

By Adrianne Hutto

From ghoulish spirits and ancient legends to demonic presences and legalized cannibalism, these novels are thrilling tales that will haunt your mind. This month is Latine and Hispanic Heritage Month by giving you a list of books sure to make your skin crawl and keep you up at night. Here are 10 thrilling novels written by must-read voices in their genre.

House of Bone and Rain

by Gabino Iglesias

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. 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.

$29.00

$38.00 CAD

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Coyote Songs

by Gabino Iglesias

In this mosaic horror/crime novel, ghosts and old gods guide the hands of those caught up in a violent struggle to save the soul of the American southwest. A man tasked with shuttling children over the border believes the Virgin Mary is guiding him towards final justice. A woman offers colonizer blood to the Mother of Chaos. A boy joins corpse destroyers to seek vengeance for the death of his father. These stories intertwine with those of a vengeful spirit and a hungry creature to paint a timely, compelling, pulpy portrait of revenge, family, and hope.

$17.99

$23.99 CAD

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Salt Bones

by Jennifer Givhan

At the edge of the Salton Sea, in the blistering borderlands, something is out hunting. . . Malamar Veracruz has never left the dust-choked town of El Valle. Here, Mal has done her best to build a good life: She’s raised two children, worked hard, and tried to forget the painful, unexplained disappearance of her sister, Elena. When another local girl goes missing, Mal plunges into a fresh yet familiar nightmare. As a desperate Mal hunts for answers, her search becomes increasingly tangled with inscrutable visions of a horse-headed woman, a local legend who Mal feels compelled to follow. Mal’s perspective is joined by the voices of her two daughters, all three of whom must work to uncover the truth about the missing girls in their community before it’s too late. Combining elements of Latina and Indigenous culture, family drama, mystery, horror, and magical realism in a spellbinding mix, Salt Bones lays bare the realities of environmental catastrophe, family secrets, and the unrelenting bond between mothers and daughters.

$29.00

$38.00 CAD

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The Possession of Alba Díaz

Isabel Cañas

In 1765, plague sweeps through Zacatecas. Alba flees with her wealthy merchant parents and fiancé, Carlos, to his family’s isolated mine for refuge. But safety proves fleeting as other dangers soon bare their teeth: Alba begins suffering from strange hallucinations, sleepwalking, and violent convulsions. She senses something cold lurking beneath her skin. Something angry. Something wrong. In the fight for her life, Alba and Elías become entangled with the occult, the Church, long-kept secrets, and each other… not knowing that one of these things will spell their doom.

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Hardcover

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The Unworthy

Agustina Bazterrica; Sarah Moses (Translator)

From her cell in a mysterious convent, a woman writes the story of her life in whatever she can find—discarded ink, dirt, and even her own blood. A lower member of the Sacred Sisterhood, deemed an unworthy, she dreams of ascending to the ranks of the Enlightened at the center of the convent and of pleasing the foreboding Superior Sister. Outside, the world is plagued by catastrophe—cities are submerged underwater, electricity and the internet are nonexistent, and bands of survivors fight and forage in a cruel, barren landscape. Inside, the narrator is controlled, punished, but safe. But when a stranger makes her way past the convent walls, joining the ranks of the unworthy, she forces the narrator to consider her long-buried past—and what she may be overlooking about the Enlightened. As the two women grow closer, the narrator is increasingly haunted by questions about her own past, the environmental future, and her present life inside the convent. How did she get to the Sacred Sisterhood? Why can’t she remember her life before? And what really happens when a woman is chosen as one of the Enlightened?

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Hardcover

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Her Body and Other Parties

Carmen Maria Machado

In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women’s lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.

Format

Trade Paperback

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Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave

Mariana Enriquez; Megan McDowell (Translator)

In this rich book of essays–“excursions through death,” she calls them–Enriquez travels through North and South America, Europe and Australia, visiting Paris’s catacombs, Prague’s Old Jewish Cemetery, New Orleans’s aboveground mausoleums, Buenos Aires’s opulent Recoleta, and more. Enriquez investigates each cemetery’s history and architecture, its saints and ghosts, its caretakers and visitors, and, of course, its dead. Weaving personal stories with reportage, interviews, myths, hauntology, and more, Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave is memoir channeled through Enriquez’s passion for cemeteries, revealing as much about her own life and unique sensibility as the graveyards and tombstones she tours. Fascinating, spooky, and unlike anything else, Enriquez’s first work of nonfiction, translated by the award-winning Megan McDowell, is as original and memorable as the stories and novels for which she’s become so beloved and admired.

Format

Hardcover

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Mayra

Nicky Gonzalez

It’s been years since Ingrid has heard from her childhood best friend, Mayra, a fearless rebel who fled their hometown of Hialeah for college in the Northeast. But when Mayra calls out of the blue to invite Ingrid to a weekend getaway, she impulsively accepts. From the moment Ingrid sets out, danger looms and when she finally arrives their reunion is spoiled by the reemergence of past disagreements and the unexpected presence of Mayra’s new boyfriend, Benji. The trio spend their hours eating lavish meals and exploring the labyrinthine house, which holds as much mystery as the swamp itself. Indoors and on the grounds, time itself seems to expand, and Ingrid begins to lose a sense of the outside world, and herself. Against this disquieting setting, where lizards dart in and out of porches and alligators peek from dark waters, Gonzalez weaves a surreal, unforgettable story about the dizzying power of early friendship and the lengths we’ll go to earn love and acceptance–even at the risk of losing ourselves entirely.

Format

Hardcover

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Bochica

Carolina Flórez-Cerchiaro

In 1923 Soacha, Colombia, La Casona–an opulent mansion perched above the legendary Salto del Tequendama waterfall–was once home to Antonia and her family, who settle in despite their constant nightmares and the house’s malevolent spirit. But tragedy strikes when Antonia’s mother takes a fatal fall into El Salto and her father, consumed by grief, attempts to burn the house down with Antonia still inside. Three years later, haunted by disturbing dreams and cryptic journal entries from her late mother, Antonia is drawn back to her childhood home when it is converted into a luxurious hotel. As Antonia confronts her fragmented memories and the dark history of the estate, she wrestles with unsettling questions she can no longer ignore: Was her mother’s death by her own hands, or was it by someone else’s?

Format

Trade Cloth; Trade Cloth

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Vanishing Daughters

Cynthia Pelayo

The nightmares of a woman in white pleading to come home, music switched on in locked rooms, and the panicked fear of being swallowed by the dark…Bri has almost convinced herself that these stirrings of dread are simply manifestations of grief and not the beyond-world of ghostly impossibilities her mother believed in. And more tangible terrors still lurk outside the decaying Victorian greystone. A serial killer has claimed the lives of fifty-one women in the Chicago area. When Bri starts researching the murders, she meets a stranger who tells her there’s more to her sleepless nights than bad dreams–they hold the key to putting ghosts to rest and stopping a killer. But the killer has caught on and is closing in, and if Bri doesn’t answer the call of the dead soon, she’ll be walking among them.

Format

Trade Paperback

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10 Thrilling and Chilling Horror Novels to Kick-Off Latine and Hispanic Heritage Month

House of Bone and Rain

Format

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Coyote Songs

Format

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Salt Bones

Format

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The Possession of Alba Díaz

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The Unworthy

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Her Body and Other Parties

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Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave

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Mayra

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Bochica

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Vanishing Daughters

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What to Read Next…

Read the Excerpt: House of Bone and Rain by Gabino Iglesias

Gothic Mysteries Perfect for Fans of ‘Rebecca’

The Horror Inside You: What Doppelgangers Expose About Our Inner Darkness

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Format

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Format

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What to Read Next…

Read the Excerpt: House of Bone and Rain by Gabino Iglesias

Gothic Mysteries Perfect for Fans of ‘Rebecca’

The Horror Inside You: What Doppelgangers Expose About Our Inner Darkness