13 Questions With Cynthia Gómez

Cynthia Gómez’s debut book The Nightmare Box and Other Stories is a love letter to her home, Oakland. When we were looking for authors to feature for Women in Horror Month, hers was the first name that touched our pointy little tongues.

Question 1: How do you feel about women’s representation in horror today, specifically as a Latine woman? 

Here’s a test (this applies to all marginalized groups, by the way): Think about conference panels, or festival panels, or even bookstore displays, related to horror. How common is it for you to see all women authors there unless the topic is specifically related to their identity as women?¹ Much less a panel of all Latine women horror writers. We need to start getting book displays about haunted/possessed houses with Ashley Deng, Trang Thanh Tran, Tananarive Due, Shirley Jackson, Sarah Gailey, etc. Or conference panels about, say, the vampire tradition in horror with Nicole Givens Kurtz and Jewelle Gomez and V. Castro and Isabel Cañas. Maybe they can make room for one white woman. For diversity.

• Any advice for women trying to step into the horror genre?

I’ll give a short answer and then a longer one for those so inclined. The short answer: Read. A lot. For joy and inspiration and because it will improve your craft. Become your local library’s favorite user (we’re called “power users,” apparently, and libraries love us!)

Okay, the longer answer: Read your work out loud when you revise it. Share it with at least three different readers. If you get a chance to do a mentorship through SFWA or HWA or some other mechanism, take it. 

Rejections are part of being a writer. Let yourself be sad about them if you need to be, but remember that you’re going to get your acceptances, too, and let yourself feel the joy of each one. Also, it’s probably a good plan to start writing short stories rather than jumping into a novel straight away: It gives you a chance to practice your craft and also let your fans start to find you, and you get experience with rejections, but also the joy of acceptances. In my case, I needed to do that because I just didn’t have the writing stamina, the confidence, or the skill, to successfully tackle a novella until I’d been writing for several years. Obviously, your mileage may vary.

Making metaphor and meaning out of awfulness is part of how we survive it.

And as far as being a woman in all this: I myself have not had to deal with a whole lot of sexism in the community, not directly. But I’m decidedly in the minority on that. And whether we have to deal with it directly or just operate with the awareness that it could happen, either way, it’s impacting us. It’s either hanging over our head as a threat or in front of us pulling bullshit, or both. So, my advice is to find allies. Mine haven’t only been other women, but they’ve been people who I trust to tell me if someone is untrustworthy, to help me talk through my options if something is giving me an icky feeling, and who I know would support me if I had to deal with something. 

And I can also say that I get a lot of satisfaction out of taking the oppression that hangs over us all the time and making meaning out of it. Putting it on the page, turning it into a cartoon or a metaphor or a fever dream. Making metaphor and meaning out of awfulness is part of how we survive it.

Question 2: I adore the revenge motif throughout The Nightmare Box and Other Stories. Can you tell us what revenge means to you in the current political climate?

Thank you! I am so glad it connected. Look, we have rapists and domestic abusers in power right now. Their ilk is wielding an incredible amount of power, and brutalizing and terrorizing more people every day. And are these the kinds of people who can be satisfied with the damage they’ve already done? Of course not. They’re the kinds of people who have to have more of it. So, for us to imagine even the tiniest of fictional consequences with fictional characters – a cop no longer being able to commit state-sanctioned murder, or a sexual harasser being reined in – is pretty damned cathartic right now. (And those are tiny consequences!) 

We need a different world… Until then, fictional revenge is one of our outlets and our rallying cries. It’s good to unleash our sorrow onto the page.

Another thing to note is that, in my stories, none of my characters ever gets anything that they weren’t already giving out. I have a story (“The Shivering World”)² where a character’s body erupts with every bruise he ever inflicted on someone else. I mean, all he had to do was not be an abusive piece of shit. But I guess that was too difficult. Now, is revenge what we need in real life? Of course not. We need a different world. Where what determines our daily choices isn’t the profit margins of a group of parasites, but what’s best for human beings and best for the planet. Until then, fictional revenge is one of our outlets and our rallying cries. It’s good to unleash our sorrow onto the page. And our howling anger and our utter contempt at the people who think they deserve to run the world, when they don’t even deserve to run a lemonade stand.

Question 3: What is your writing process like?

“Write every day, no matter what” works for some people, but it doesn’t work for me. Over a given year, there will be months when I have daily word-count or other goals and I push myself to meet them. But even then, I don’t write every day –  if I’ve got a word-count goal, I can make it up the next day or by the end of the week. The cool thing is that the more time I spend in the world of my stories, and the more real my characters become, the more I want to keep spending time with them – so there is a positive feedback loop. Joy begets more joy.

I don’t let myself start a new major project if I’m not done with what’s in front of me, but I let myself put flesh on the story’s bones, a little bit at a time. Example: I had a deadline for revisions for Project A, but Project B kept calling to me, so I’d open up the file and write a sentence or two, to step into the voice of that character or inhabit that world. Then, when I was done with revisions and I could step into Project B, I already had a lot to go on, and it made that next one easier.

Question 4: Can you tell us, as a writer, what it’s like living in Oakland and the Bay Area?  What do you love most about Oakland as a Latine writer who has roots there? Which Bay Area book store is your favorite?

I love everything about this place. The flora, the fauna, the fact that we’re surrounded by water. I can hike for ten minutes into the hills and see the Bay and three bridges –  I see the Bay every day I get on BART, as a matter of fact. There are redwood trees everywhere, the closest thing I have to a spirit tree. 

There’s also the rich history, which I love because I really dig writing historical fiction, especially paired with a radical legacy. The occupation of Alcatraz in 1969. The Panthers and the Free Speech Movement and Ethnic Studies programs were all born out of struggles that came out of this very place. The Compton’s Cafeteria riots happened in San Francisco, three years before Stonewall; the country’s longest-running queer bar is in Oakland. And there’s a History Room at the library, and multiple nationally recognized archives, that I can reach out to and make an appointment with if I want to learn more about any of these things. It’s incredible, and I plan to spend the rest of my writing life digging into these stories and putting them onto the page.

One kid was like, “Where do you think you are? This is Oakland.” Exactly, my friend. Exactly.

Oh, and let me tell you one little anecdote: A few months ago, not long after the election, I went into a grocery store and there was some loud obnoxious Trump supporter there and the customers and the cashiers were reading him for filth. Just calling him everything but a child of God, to use a phrase. One kid was like, “Where do you think you are? This is Oakland.” Exactly, my friend. Exactly.

I love [Bay Area bookstore] Walden Pond. It’s an institution. I go there just to feel at home.

Question 5: What initially drew you to the horror genre? 

It’s fun. It’s fun to be scared and to play with our imaginations, where there’s this whole other invented world hidden inside of and parallel to our own. I read Roald Dahl when I was nine: witches and talking centipedes and Vermicious Knids and medicine that made crabby Grandma grow twenty feet high. Then when I was eleven, I read Stephen King —Misery and Eyes of the Dragon—and they had me thoroughly hooked: the latter for its magic and the gruesomeness of its poisons and spells; the former for its beautiful language and its claustrophobia and the gruesomeness of Annie Wilkes and her axe. I guess you could say I have a pattern.

Question 6: Which piece are you most proud of? 

[I hope for] more queerness, more women, more rage. Marginalized people getting pissed off and taking up space and gaining more power and taking no shit.

Question 7: Do you have a favorite horror trope/character/cryptid, and if so, what is it?

So many! The first that popped into my head was the creepy doll/mannequin, so let’s go with that. Tourist Trap, with its murderous mannequins; Dolls, about, well, murderous dolls; Deadly Friend, if you like robot versions. Dolls was actually an inspirational text for my upcoming novella Muñeca.

Question 8: Favorite books/authors? What are you reading right now? 

I’ll stick to horror books to make this easier: We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Her Body and Other Parties, Come Closer, The Ballad of Black Tom, The Only Good Indians, Rosemary’s Baby, Night Shift. Also, she’s only horror-adjacent, but I’ll read everything Sarah Waters writes.

Right now I’m reading, and listening to the audiobook for, Fever House by Keith Rosson, about a possessed hand that ends up in all the wrong places, and it’s such bloody fun (pun intended.) Also, give the narrator, Xe Sands, all the flowers: It’s so well-narrated that I kept rewinding certain lines over and over again.

Question 9: What was your first horror movie?

The earliest I can definitely identify is The Shining. It’s beautiful and cold and, well, shining, and so effective and so terrifying. And the more I watch it, the more I’m convinced that Kubrick didn’t really care for people or their motivations (especially women). To him, they were just beautiful puppets. 

Question 10: What do you hope for in the future for the horror genre?

Similar things I hope for in the world more generally: more queerness, more women, more rage. Marginalized people getting pissed off and taking up space and gaining more power and taking no shit.

Question 11: Any advice on how to market your work? What has worked well for you? 

I have no clue! I can only say that what works for me as a potential reader are interesting comparisons (Carrie meets Les Miserables, you say?) and excerpts. Screenshotted excerpts, because fuck AI.

Question 12: How do you like to stay involved in the horror literature & writing community? 

Social media does play a role, and I’ve also got friends I’ve made who are regular critique partners and writing buddies and the like. And I really loved going to StokerCon the past two years.

Question 13: Upcoming titles/plans for the future? Any book tours/speaking events you have planned?

If you’re in the Bay Area, you can find me at the Bay Area Book Festival (along with my friend Mara Olivas; she and I both had Bay Area horror books come out last year). And Fall 2026 will see my first novella, Muñeca; it’s about a young witch in 1968 Oakland who tries to save her former employer’s daughter from a spell, losing control of her heart and her powers in the process.

You can find me at cynthiasaysboo.bsky.social. Thank you for doing these interviews and for the really thoughtful questions.

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Footnotes

1. With the exception of FIYAHCon. Please let some rich benefactor give the organizers lots of $$ so they can put on more of them. ↩︎
2. “The Shivering World” is a story in the book Split Scream, Vol. 2, written by Cynthia Gomez and M. Lopez da Silva. It is part of a wonderful series of books originating from Dead Stone Press. (RIP), and now with Tenebrous Press.- Ed. ↩︎
3. “Huitzol and the Rope of Thorns” can be found in Cynthia’s latest book, The Nightmare Box and Other Stories. – Ed. ↩︎