San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Writer draws on local legends for horror novel
When novelist V. Castro was about 9 years old, her mom took her on a birthday tour of all the spots in San Antonio where supernatural occurrences were believed to have happened.
Among the places they visited were the ghost tracks, a railroad crossing where the spirits of children killed in a bus crash are said to push vehicles stopped on the tracks to safety, and the club where a young woman who ventured out one night against her mother’s wishes ended up dancing with the devil himself.
Those tales and others inspired the stories Castro told in her San Antonio-set novellas “Goddess of Filth” and “Hairspray and Switchblades.” And she created an urban legend of her own in her new horror novel, “Queen of the Cicadas” (Flame Tree Press, $14.95), which goes on sale Tuesday.
“Being Mexican American, I grew up with a ton of stories,” said Castro, 41, a graduate of Clark High School who now lives in the United Kingdom. “Everybody knows La Lechuza, La Llorona; in San Antonio, there’s a ton of urban legends. So I grew up with that.
“But even beyond that, the Aztec history, being Mestiza, that history of Spanish conquest, is a horror. And the way those gods and goddesses were assimilated and brought into the Judeo-Christian culture, that also played in my mind.”
“Queen of the Cicadas” is a read-it-with-the-lights-on tale. The gruesome 1952 murder of a migrant worker named Milagros on a farm in Alice attracts the attention of Mictecacihuatl, the Aztec goddess of death. She serves vengeance in forms as brutal as the original murder, which included desiccated cicadas shells being shoved down Milagros’ throat.
In the book, Milagros, dubbed La Reina de Las Chicarras (the Queen of the Cicadas), has become an urban legend along the lines of Bloody Mary. Many believe her spirit can be summoned by repeating her name over and over while looking into a mirror.
Belinda, the novel’s protagonist, first hears the story at a childhood sleepover. Decades later, a friend holds her wedding at the ranch where Milagros was killed, a site that has been turned into an events venue. Belinda shares the urban legend with the wedding party and soon becomes obsessed with it, setting the fast-moving story in motion.
The book is getting strong reviews. Publisher’s Weekly described it as “visceral and disturbing in the best of ways.” And Kirkus called it “a tightly paced story of anti-colonial resistance and shared history that begs to be read in one sitting.”
Castro grew up writing — “I have papers and stories that I wrote as a kid with really awful drawings” — but didn’t start pursuing it as a profession until about four years ago.
“It was just like a light went on, and I haven’t stopped since,” she said.
She starting writing again partly as a way to deal with homesickness. She moved to the U.K. with her then-partner 14 years ago because they had a child together, and she found herself longing for San Antonio.
“I was feeling a bit lost, feeling like something was missing in my life,” she said. “Writing and digging into my history has been a way to reconnect with myself and hopefully connecting with other people who may share those emotions or traumatic experiences, or they just want a good story.”
She sets much of her work in her hometown. Part of that is because she writes to reconnect with the city, and part of that is because it’s such a rich place.
“San Antonio is a very unique blend of American and Mexican culture,” she said. “I think it really personifies when these two cultures collide. Kind of like in the conquest, you have these two worlds colliding, and how do they interplay, what kind of alchemy is created, what type of people develop in these environments, what is lost, what is gained? For me, in San Antonio, there’s all of that.”
“Queen of the Cicadas” is set mostly in Alice, though a few scenes take place in San Antonio. For the book, Castro drew in part on family stories and on her own life. Her great-grandparents were migrant farmworkers who traveled all over the county to pick cotton and blueberries, among other crops. And there’s a lot of Castro in Belinda, particularly her experiences as a Mexican American woman.
“You’re caught between the two cultures of Mexico and of being American, because they’re very different, being Mexican American and being Mexican,” she said. “So there’s that element. But there was also the element that I feel in literature, in media, the Mexican American experience, and the Chicana experience specifically, is not explored.
“You rarely see us on TV, you rarely see us in books, and when you do, it’s not from our own voice, it’s not our story, written by us, it’s not created by us. So for me, that was really important.”
That issue bubbled to the surface last year with the ballyhooed release of Jeanine Cummins’ novel “American Dirt.” The book is about a Mexican mother and child who cross the border while fleeing cartel killers. Cummins is not of Mexican heritage, and that fact coupled with the huge amount of attention the book received sparked a lot of discussion about the appropriation of Latino stories and the disparity between the way that the work of white authors and authors of color have been treated by publishers.
The first passage in “Queen of the Cicadas” includes the phrase “brown masses,” which also pops up in “American Dirt.” Castro saw that as a way to reclaim the term.
“I was directly countering ‘American Dirt,’ ” she said. “Because when that book came out, it really affected me, just like it affected a lot of Latino writers.
“For me to write this book was a way for me to reclaim my power as a woman, as a brown writer, and as a Chicana.”
She had a hard time selling “Queen of the Cicadas,” she said — “I had so many doors slammed in my face” — so the buzz around it has been gratifying.
She has two other books in the pipeline. “Mestiza Blood,” a short story collection in which she puts her own spin on Texas urban legends, is slated for release in January. And she’s hoping to get “The Generational Curse of La Llorona” published as well.
“We all know the story about her, being a woman who killed her children because of the love of a man,” she said. “But I take it and use it to explore postnatal depression, because so many times, women are labeled as crazy, they’re gaslighted … for making certain decisions. But what drove them to those decisions? What was going on? And that goes back to not being able to tell your own story.”