Cynthia “Cina” Pelayo is an International Latino Book Award–winning and three-time Bram Stoker Awards–nominated poet and author. She is the author of Lotería, Santa Muerte, The Missing, and Poems of My Night. Her recent collection of poetry, Into the Forest and All the Way Through, explores the epidemic of missing and murdered women in the United States and was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award and an Elgin Award. Her modern-day horror retelling of the Pied Piper fairy tale, Children of Chicago, was released by Agora/Polis Books and won an International Latino Book Award for Best Mystery (2021). Her upcoming novels include The Shoemaker’s Magician (Polis, 2023) and Funeral at Clark Street Bridge (Thomas & Mercer, 2024). Cina was raised in inner city Chicago, where she still lives. LJ’s Horror Review columnist, Becky Spratford, talks with her about writing and writers. 

Can you share a little bit about your journey from Puerto Rico to Chicago to today?

I was born in Puerto Rico and raised in Chicago, in Hermosa, which is right west of Logan Square in the city. My parents didn’t really speak or read English. My mother would then recite fairy tales to me in Spanish, “Caperucita Roja”— “Little Red Riding Hood”—and so on. I remember this book my dad bought me at Aldi, a Little Golden Book, and I remember how hard he tried to read it to me. I even remember the word he struggled with “galoshes.” As he read that children’s tale to me, I remember very clearly telling myself then, I must have been four, that I wanted to one day be able to read so smoothly and so easily. By the sixth grade I had already surpassed a twelfth-grade reading level.

[After graduating from Columbia College, working as a journalist, and earning a master of science in marketing] I applied to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Master of Fine Arts in Writing program and was initially rejected, but then the chair called me and asked me to get in a cab (get in a cab—this is how long ago this was) and meet him in his office. Totally “back in the day” sort of stuff. In his office, he asked me to clarify what it was I wanted to do, because all of my application materials indicated I was a journalist, and the program was geared to poetry and fiction writing. I told them I just wanted to write stories but didn’t know how. I wanted them to teach me how to tell stories, while still incorporating the essence of my journalism training. He took my words back to the admissions board, and I was admitted.

At SAIC, my graduate advisors were Ruth Margraff and Jesse Ball. I remember clearly them telling me, as I started submitting work to be read and critiqued, “You’re a horror writer who doesn’t know they’re a horror writer.” I asked them what was I supposed to do, and they told me to fully embrace it, but they also recognized elements of traditional crime and mystery and fairy tales in my writing. It was they who told me to begin to fully feel confident in creating my own voice and being comfortable with mixing genres. At SAIC, I built my coursework around classes dealing with drama/plays, fairy tales, and detective fiction. When I think of the foundation of my writing style, it’s really influenced by those things—dramas/playwrighting, mystery and detective fiction, horror, and fairy tales.

I wrote Lotería as my MFA thesis in 2010 and self-published it. Lotería is now going to be re-published by Polis books in 2023.

I still live in the same neighborhood I grew up in. It was important for me to stay here. By day I still work for that same marketing research firm as a vice president. I’m a mom of two small children. So I’m very busy. I write at night. I have a pretty chaotic schedule, but ultimately, I’m still, in many ways, that little girl who was read stories by her father and who just wants to read and write stories, particularly fairy tales.

How have you used your life experiences to create these gripping and terrifying tales that speak truth to so many readers?

That was what I set out to do initially in writing fiction, I wanted to process a lot of the real-world horrors I had experienced while growing up in inner city Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s. I came to a point where journalism just became too difficult. Realism became too difficult, and so I had to write about it using various elements and themes to communicate the pain experienced and that really never goes away. Fairy tales became my main device to insert, and of course the supernatural and the fantastical. So much of my writing is grounded in loss, mourning, grief, and how that suffering really never goes away, it lingers there and it spreads across communities, time, and history.

Much of my work is a commentary on the world we live in, focusing on hurt and harm. Into the Forest and All the Way Through was me trying to understand how so many women in the United States, particularly women of color, go missing or are murdered, and their cases grow cold. That’s truly devastating. Children of Chicago is a commentary on youth violence in the city of Chicago, weaved in with how sometimes the people we hope to protect us do not keep us safe, but instead contribute to that harm. Crime Scene, another poetry collection, really reflects on the endless nature of crime. It never ends, there’s another body, another victim, and I just wonder why do we do this to each other? Why do human beings continue to harm one another in the way that they do?

So, I’ve seen a lot of loss, particularly in youth. I like to think of myself today as a silent observer, observing people and how we interact with one another, and I do tend to overanalyze quite a bit, getting lost in my writer brain. It all comes back to this question of why are we monsters to one another? It’s painful to see this and to have experienced it in real life, and so writing horror has been my place to work through this.

Who are some of your favorite writers?

I do love everything by Alma Katsu, absolutely everything: The Deep, The Fervor, The Hunger, and so on. I love the lyricism of Gwendolyn Kiste, so there’s The Rust Maidens, Boneset & Feathers, Reluctant Immortals, and so on.

I also very much enjoy novels dealing with Chicago as a character, for obvious reasons, so The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson as well as The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes is a personal favorite, and I love how genre is blended here.