Muñeca: A Guest Post by Cynthia Gómez

A vivid, surreal Gothic about a queer, Latine, working class witch who sets out to rescue a bespelled heiress and loses control of her powers and her heart in the process. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Cynthia Gómez on writing Muñeca. 

This book started with an image of a woman in her bed, stuck in her body, and with me asking myself: how did she get that way? Did someone put her there, and if so, how… and why? And what would it take for someone to try and free her? Who would that someone be, and why would they do it? Once I had answered those questions, then Muñeca basically leapt over all of the other novel ideas I’d been playing with, and didn’t let me go.

The Gothic elements came after, when I realized that “woman trapped in house because of an evil spell” is just catnip for Gothic plots. And because so much of the Gothic is about the past haunting the present, that in turn was a chance for me to bring in the story of land theft and land loss after the Mexican-American war, which is a question I’d wanted to explore in fiction for years.

I’ve loved watching and reading horror since I was a kid watching The Shining way too young. Horror is, to quote Lady Macbeth, “the very painting of your fear.” It’s our fears and anxieties in smaller form, removed and through layers of metaphor. It’s also fun. It’s theatrical and outlandish and full of fake blood and wonderful movie scores (I challenge you to not hear the sound of the score of Psycho in your head now, just because I invoked it.)

And I love creating horror because I really want to engage with: just whose fears? And of what? And how are our fears informed and shaped by our lives and our experiences and what powerful people would do to us if given half a chance?

Finding Natalia’s voice was a joy. Before I wrote her dialogue, I sketched out who she was as a person. She wasn’t the naive, wide-eyed Gothic heroine from so many of the books I’d read. She already had her own life and her queer found family, and she also had a healthy contempt for the family and everything they represented. And she was extremely devious and clever, wearing the mask of the docile, compliant servant, just like her mother had. I had that settled before I started writing, and so that made it refreshingly easy to write Nati and her rich inner monologue, all those caustic comments she has to keep in her head while smiling and nodding along. Her dialogue, with its confidence – acquired from both her mother and her grandmother – was so much fun to write, especially as she gains confidence and power towards the end. Her tone and voice in those scenes were borrowed heavily from the tone of all those heist movies and thrillers I watched growing up. It’s something of a spoiler, II guess, to say that the tables turn at least once in this book, and that when that happens, Nati is partially my mouthpiece: she gets to say all the quick, quippy, cutting things I wish I could say to the kind of villains I put in my book