Cynthia Gómez is the author of the story collection The Nightmare Box and Other Stories, and a Tin House and VONA alumn whose short fiction has published in Fantasy Magazine, Strange Horizons, Pseudopod, Nightmare Magazine, and numerous anthologies.
Gómez’s new release, Muñeca, is a queer, Latine novel set in 1968 Oakland about a working-class witch who sets out to save a bespelled heiress and explores misogyny, racial hierarchy, classism, and the power of female friendship and community.
Book Riot called Muñeca one of the best horror books of 2026 so far. It also appeared on lists such as “15 Books Our Critics Can’t Wait for This Summer” from NPR, and Buzzfeed’s “Best LGBTQ+ Books of 2026.”
Gómez sat down with Cemetery Dance to discuss her new gothic horror release, Muñeca, the author’s early experiences reading classic gothic horror, additional influences such as Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Isabel Cañas, and the creepy doll trope.
You can connect with her at cynthiasaysboo.wordpress.com
(Interview conducted by Haley Newlin)
CEMETERY DANCE: Muñeca is such an impressive debut with so many of my favorite tropes and subgenres of horror, especially gothic. How do you think your early experiences reading classics from mothers of gothic horror like V.C. Andrews and Daphne Du Maurier affected your approach to writing Muñeca?
CYNTHIA GÓMEZ: I’ve loved the Gothic from a very early age, starting with The Secret Garden and, yes, V.C. Andrews. I think it’s hard to appreciate just how influential those works were for me; they inspired in me an absolute love for the Gothic, with its family secrets and the hideous things kept in attics (so many attics!) and a deep wish to write my own Gothic one day. I also took really strong inspiration from Sarah Waters, from the class rage and the concept that class rage can be a supernatural force.
And another tremendous influence that all my Gothic reading had on me is best explained this way: I remember all those covers, those young white women running from their mansions in their white nightgowns. But, as I enjoy pointing out, you know what those novels very rarely concern themselves with?
Just who was washing all those gowns, anyway? And what might their lives and their interiority – and their political agenda – bring to the Gothic? That question is one of the many reasons I wanted to write this book.
You mention in the introduction of Muñeca that Isabel Cañas and Silvia Moreno-Garcia have also influenced your writing. What is your favorite book from each author and why? How do you think these titles shaped your writing process or the way you thought about creating characters and atmosphere in your debut novel?
My favorite Cañas is far and away The Possession of Alba Díaz. From the opening paragraphs, we know we’re going to be dealing with a lush, extremely dramatic, bloody tale, and it delivers. I didn’t read it until after I’d finished working on Muñeca, but the way she writes longing and lust has already seeped its way into my next book. For Silvia Moreno-García, my favorite has to be Mexican Gothic, for the way that the English colonial family’s monstrous legacy seeps into the very soil, into the walls. (I also dug the way that the main character, Maite, in Velvet Was the Night, is allowed to be highly flawed and almost pitiable.) In terms of their influence, I think that overwhelmingly it was because they’re such standard bearers of the modern Gothic; by that I mean that they are so much more explicit and conscious about sex and sexuality and skin color and class.
Muñeca blends horror and historical fiction so effectively. What was it like researching subjects such as Spanish colonial land grant recipients and the queer landscape of Oakland in the late 1960s? Do you enjoy the research part of the writing process?
So, for the research for this book, picture me sitting in a sunny room on the top floor of the Oakland Public Library, in their Oakland History Room, surrounded by old newspapers and land grant maps and congressional record books, my pencil happily scratching and my hands tapping away at my laptop. You can also picture my face falling when I realized that not only was I not going to be able to set Muñeca inside the actual home I was determined to set it in (it’s called the Ellen Kenna House) but that I wouldn’t be able to set it in Oakland at all. This is because all of Oakland is encompassed in what was a single land grant, to Luís María Peralta, and I didn’t want to base the Miramontes family on any real people. So I found that nearby towns had some smaller land grants, and it was plausible that the Miramontes ancestor was one of those grantees.
Funnily enough, I picked Orinda, as opposed to other nearby towns with similar backstories, because it had the best name. And come to find out that Orinda was for many years a sundown town. I didn’t know that when I picked it, but, as I said at an event, the history of the U.S. is so soaked in racism and death, that you stick a knife into any part of its soil and it’s going to come up bloody.
I love research so much. In fact, it’s not entirely a stretch to say that I want to keep on writing historical fiction just so I can have an excuse to keep learning about times and places and events that I want to explore.
I loved that Muñeca features an iconic symbol of horror – dolls. However, you take this classic agent of terror in the genre and turn it on its head. Without giving too much away, can you speak to the doll element in the book and why you find yourself drawn to dolls?
I love creepy dolls in horror; the 1988 horror film Dolls was actually one of the inspiration texts for this book. I think I’m partly drawn to dolls for the reasons that a lot of us are: because they look just enough like humans to inhabit that kind of uncanny valley, that human-like territory. I also love what I get to do with dolls in my horror – I’ve written three stories now where a doll or figurine plays a key role in the plot – because I can subvert the way that dolls are treated in real life. In real life, dolls are associated with femininity, so in turn they’re associated with weakness. I got a chance to play with that a little in this book – to turn it on its head, as you say – although I won’t spoil it for the reader by mentioning exactly how.
What makes this book so special is Natalia and Violeta’s relationship and the power of female support and community. I couldn’t stop thinking about the ever-present threat of the white van, one of the many symbols of theft of autonomy in the book. What do you think this story says about collective opposition to injustice?
When I started daydreaming this book, one of the first images was of Violeta, trapped inside her body, and without giving anything away, I’ll say that I always knew that patriarchy would be connected to why she was so horribly trapped. But the more I started writing the book, the more I realized how rich the theme was, about loss of autonomy. It comes up with that looming threat of that van, a threat that looms over the lives of every female character in the book (especially the queer ones.) It comes up every time people treat the paralyzed Violeta like, well, a doll (even Nati catches herself doing that) because her disabled body isn’t valuable. She isn’t valuable, unless she’s making babies or hosting parties or managing the house, and that’s because of the patriarchal values her family lives by. And of course it comes up when we realize that women couldn’t even get a no-fault divorce in the U.S. in 1968. (I’m sorry to tell you that attacks on no-fault divorce are part of the right-wing playbook in the U.S.)
It’s really interesting to highlight the role of collective response, because I think that being part of a collective living situation, living with her queer found family, is what makes Nati such a good foil to the Miramontes family. There are all these little nods I put into the collective spirit that was blossoming in the ‘60s: the poster-making parties, the consciousness-raising sessions, the anti-war movement. Because when Nati comes into that house, she’s bringing all of 1968 with her, in her way. She’s representing an entirely different family structure, but she’s also got her class-conscious politics, influenced by her mother’s pro-union and pro-working class politics, and those politics are also a direct opposition, and a threat, to the patriarchal values that the Miramontes family upholds.
As an avid horror reader yourself, I have to know, what are some of your all-time favorite horror books? Horror films?
Oh, man. Okay, so, films: The Shining, Rosemary’s Baby, It Follows, Ready or Not, Sinners, Scream, The Silence of the Lambs, Get Out.
Books: The Shining, Rosemary’s Baby, The Haunting of Hill House, Misery, Carrie, The Ballad of Black Tom.
Can readers expect more horror stories from you?
Oh, yes. I am a horror kid, through and through, and it’s not an accident that my first published story happened when I stopped trying to write literary fiction and gave myself permission to take inspiration from Stephen King and write a story prompted by “what if?” (In that case, it was “what if an apartment seems to have one very cursed spot on its wall, and something awful happens to anyone whose photograph is hung in that spot?”)
My current WIP is much more ambitious in scope (it’s got two timelines, 1913 and 2013) and a lot more characters) and it’s also much more gnarly in body horror, which is definitely out of my comfort zone. I’ve also got two stories in two different anthologies coming out in August: one is called “Rich Soil,” in an anthology called Eat the Rich, by Atomic Carnival Press, and it’s about a CEO whose trees have…plans for him, shall we say. The second story, “I Spy,” also comes out in August, in Under a Malevolent Eye, an anthology about surveillance capitalism. “I Spy” is about a factory owner whose granddaughter’s new doll turns out to be capable of way more than he thought.
