This week I have a special 6 day feature centered around Creature Publishing. From their "About" page:
Based in Virginia with roots in New York, Creature Publishing specializes in feminist horror, dark speculative fiction, women-driven thrillers, spooky fantastical fiction, literary fiction, and the like.
Founded in 2019, Creature has served as a platform for stories which challenge the status quo, offering titles with a broad and inclusive, transgressive and intersectional, understanding of what horror is and who can make it. As Creature has grown and evolved, our initial interest in horror’s potential for social commentary and catharsis, as well as its potential to cross into other genres and subvert genre altogether, has led to our more formal adoption of writing within the realm of thrillers, sci-fi, and fantasy, particularly when fear or horrific elements continue to play a role, but always where the writing is innovative and powerful, the stories reflecting and widening our understanding of others and the world.
About the Name & Those Delightful Spines
Our books have won or been finalists for the Bram Stoker Award, the Ladies of Horror Fiction Award, and the Foreword Indies. Our books are creatures—living, forceful entities with desires of their own, capable of inspiring fear, passion, anxiety, dread. The illustration on the spines of our books speaks to this idea. Our name is also a nod to the content of the genre itself; horror is full of creatures, human and nonhuman and all things in-between. They can be sinister or benevolent, familiar or “other.” The monster under the bed, the monster in bed with us, the monster inside. Our creatures have bones to pick. We like it that way.
Creature is a small press on the rise, and I am proud to feature their authors all this week. Today it is time to meet Brenda LaTorre. From her website:
Brenda LaTorre is a Mexico City native, author of BRUJA’S NEST, coming out in 2026. Her stories have found a home in different places such as Pyre Magazine, BDA Publishing Anthology, the Collective Visions anthology, and more. She holds an MFA from the University of Southern Maine and a Creative Writing Certificate from UCSD. She was Editor of Popular Fiction in the Stonecoast Review Magazine in 2024. Currently, she is enjoying her work as a writing mentor in the WriteHive Mentorship Program!
LaTorre's debut is coming in early 2026 from Creature. Manns described that novel here on the blog Monday:
In Bruja’s Nest, the forthcoming debut novel from Brenda LaTorre, we get a chilling, at times darkly comedic, exploration of monstrous aristocrats, monster children, and the monstrousness of motherhood. Brenda’s focus on female rage and postpartum depression is brutally direct; her FMC’s actions to escape from her limited financial circumstances by any means possible, for herself and her child, touches upon what we’re often not allowed to recognize: a woman is going to get what she needs or wants, same as any man. Bruja’s Nest is a powerful, complicated cleanser.
In her essay, LaTorre writes openly about not seeing herself in genre she loved, so ,much so that she only used English names for her characters, that is until she read The Devil Takes You Home by Gabino Iglesias and her life was changed forever.
Reminder: Creature is offering a giveaway this week; a five book prize pack of Creature titles for one winner. Click here for the rules and details on how to enter. Get your entries in by 5pm Central this Friday (10/17) to be entered for the week's giveaway.
Now here is Brenda LaTorre sharing why she loves horror.
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Why I Love Horror
By Brenda LaTorre
Like most writers and horror fans, I feel like I’ve always loved horror. The genre has accompanied me since my early days, and as time goes by, my appreciation for it grows. I remember sneaking into the living room at seven years old at five in the morning to play Goosebumps on the TV.
However, there was a palpable disconnect between horror and the world around me, which didn’t let me fully immerse myself in the narratives I read or watched. That disconnect was even bigger when I wrote my first horror story at twelve, which was titled Magia Negra, Dark Magic.
The story was about a girl who found the Necronomicon -- I was a Lovecraft fan -- and reading it made her lose her mind, so her parents abandoned her at an insane asylum where she met a boy named Josh. She fell in love with him, and it turned out the boy didn’t exist. It was all in her head (such a bad ending, lol).
When I showed the story to my aunt, she had all kinds of questions, but the one that bothered me the most was why I named the boy Josh, which wasn’t a Mexican name at all. I didn’t have an answer yet, though the answer was that I hadn’t read too many stories with Latine names in them. I thought that was the right way to do it.
And then, I wrote other stories, and I kept using English names for my characters, because that’s what I read. I thought that if I wanted to create a successful horror story, it would have to be masculine and leaning toward Anglo culture. Not that there’s anything wrong with those elements, but they didn’t ring true; they made my voice inauthentic and distant.
It wasn’t until I got into a “Literature of Immigration” course that I discovered writers who wrote in English but kept their mother tongue intertwined between their lines, and with it, traces of their culture.
At last, I felt like I was given permission to write the way I wanted. I began to experiment with lyricism in Spanglish, the mixture between English and Spanish, still unsure if I could get anything like that published.
Not many months later, a dear friend of mine gifted me a copy of Gabino Iglesias’ The Devil Takes You Home, and what I discovered while reading it changed me forever. For the first time, I saw a real example of the kind of thing I wanted and needed to write.
It all came down to the deep connection I felt while reading the book. The way I went, aha! I’ve seen this! every few pages with excitement. How he mentioned the milagritos people take to the virgin, only to find out—to the shock of the main character and ours—that the milagrito they were taking was a boy’s finger and not a cheap metal charm.
And it wasn’t that I didn’t read local books. I had, after all, read Roberto Bolaño’s Savage Detectives, which takes place in Mexico City despite him being Chilean, among others. I think it was the lack of decolonized genre fiction. All the genre fiction in Spanish that I could find at bookstores was a translation, which explains why I thought it normal to have Josh as my main character.
Afterward, I discovered Mariana Enriquez’s Things We Lost in the Fire. Enriquez is Argentinean, but she manages to capture the essence of Latin America just the way Iglesias does. Her story “The Dirty Kid” revolves around middle-class superficial guilt and indifference. Like Iglesias, she also explores our fear of organized crime, which seeps into every aspect of society.
I consider these writers my very first mentors, and I owe so much to them. They taught me I was allowed to write what I know, my culture, my language. That it wasn’t necessary to erase the feminine parts of myself either; my love of telenovelas and romance.
I also learned that the places I grew up in and things I took for granted are very interesting to outsiders. That the common superstitions that were taught to us while we refused to do our homework are magnetic and special, if only we learn to look at them as outsiders ourselves.
Of course, as with everything, writing is also personal. I think I love horror because it rings true. It’s the most honest genre, even if so much of it stems from the imagination. The way we’re allowed to magnify situations, sometimes it’s the only way to explain what we’ve gone through. Because let’s face it, life is traumatic.
I’m typing this essay in the laundry room at my parents’ apartment, which is the only quiet room I could find. My brother is in his room, and my toddler is in mine. Both my parents blast their TVs in their own spaces, my mom in her room, and my dad in the living room. It feels like there’s no space for me here, even though my parents have been so kind to take me back. It’s not their fault at all.
I believed I’d never go back to this apartment. I mean, I dropped by often, but merely as a guest. Now I still feel like a guest, albeit I’ve been living here for two long weeks after fleeing the apartment I shared with my husband, in that forgone place I called home.
Here I am, thinking of why I love horror, while going through my own horrors after going through what can only be described as an Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber” type of marriage. Long story short, there were cameras, a lock that sent notifications on whether the door opened or closed, and absolute financial control.
“I will provide for you. I’ll give you nice things. We’re going to travel the world, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? As long as you keep your pretty little rose lips closed. As long as you ask for permission for every single thing. Here’s a car; you may not use it. Give me a child. Give me your time. Give me your money. Why do you need money? Don’t be silly; you’ve got your very own credit card that’s tied to mine. You don’t need savings.”
Like in life, horror even gives us space to laugh and play. And there’s also the very cool surface in which we encounter all sorts of transgressions with monsters and guts. We can create a monster born from rage and still make some scenes funny and make us go, “You see. Life can always be worse.”
We all go through certain hardships in life, and horror is there with open arms to swaddle you in its warmth when real life is too scary for you to face on your own. It reminds you that life could be much worse. A monster could be ripping your abdomen apart right this instant, for example.
I guess in many ways horror makes us brave. Once we’ve faced the worst of the worst on the page, we are left with a sense of relief, and that maybe starting over isn’t the end of the world when there could be actual cannibals out there waiting to sink their teeth into your flesh.
I’ve found that the more time that has passed, the more my love for horror grows. Perhaps it’s symbiotic. I liked it, and then bad things happened, and I realized horror was a crutch I could use to help me navigate the anxiety of being alive.
At the time I’m writing this essay, I feel sad and desperate. As deep inside the void as one can be. It’s a feeling similar to when you hit your head. You feel this sort of depersonalized sadness, and a metallic taste lingers on your tongue. So what have I done? I’ve been doing what any reasonable human being would do: I’ve been watching The Blob. At least there’s not a pink blob waiting for us in the corner to disintegrate our bodies when we least expect it.
And after the movie ends, and I go back to writing here in a foldable table next to the washing machine, I am allowed once more to believe that one day, perhaps not so far away, I’ll write my way out of this.
Horror makes me dream that I can build things and that things will be okay. One must write on, because even the lady at the diner didn’t stop working until the Blob grasped her arm and pulled her into the food disposal shredder in the sink.
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Yay! Cina students are rocking it! Congrats Brenda!
ReplyDeleteThank you!!!!!! <3
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