Lotería : Stories
by Cynthia Pelayo
Cynthia Pelayo’s family moved from Puerto Rico to Chicago when she was just two years old. Although raised in the U.S., her father would remind her, “You are a Latina; you speak Spanish; this is your cultural identity.” That sense of identity is deeply embedded in her fiction—both in theme and setting. Indeed, Pelayo, notably the first Latina and the first Puerto Rican to receive the prestigious Bram Stoker Award, is a prominent voice in a new wave of Latin American weird, speculative, and horror fiction.
Lotería originated as Pelayo’s MFA thesis at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Initially self-published in 2012, it was reissued by Polis Books in 2023 and hailed by Esquire as one of the best horror books of the year. It now returns in a new edition from Union Square & Co. This collection of short stories—some bordering on flash fiction and interspersed with occasional poems—is unified by the central motif of the Lotería, a Mexican game of chance featuring 54 illustrated cards. In some versions of the game, the cards draw inspiration from tarot imagery.
In Pelayo’s hands, each card (reproduced in the book) becomes the seed for a short piece that reimagines a Latin American myth or legend. The stories are populated by spectres, vampires, ghouls, and werewolves, blending horror, mystery, and the supernatural. The final story centres on the Lotería itself, bringing the collection to a satisfying thematic close.
There’s much to enjoy
in this volume, and its structure invites readers to dip in at random, as each
story stands on its own. While certain themes and motifs recur and there is, in
this regard, an element of repetition, none of the pieces overstay their
welcome, and together they form a cohesive whole.
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