Cynthia Pelayo | The PEN Ten
Bram Stoker Award-winning author Cynthia Pelayo’s newest thrillerVanishing Daughters (Amazon Publishing, 2025) combines ghost stories with serial killers while addressing systemic violence towards women. Giving voice to those whose stories were butchered both in life and after death, Pelayo’s narrative has the reader questioning who the real monster is and where blame should be placed. After protagonist Briar Thorne’s mother passes away, she begins to experience phantom impossibilities. Meanwhile, a serial killer has claimed the lives of dozens of women in her home city of Chicago and as Briar starts to investigate, a stranger informs her that her sleepless nights are the answer to stopping the murders.
In conversation with Digital Production Manager Erica Galluscio for this week’s PEN Ten, Pelayo discusses the similarities between haunting and grief, the characterizing a haunted house, and why it is important to remain open to all possibilities. (Bookshop; Barnes & Noble)
You draw a connection between grieving and the feeling of being haunted: “The living, too, suffer from the effects of death.” As someone who doesn’t believe in the afterlife, did your experience with grief feel like being haunted? Why or why not?
There is this cognitive conflict that comes with grieving someone.
They were just here. Where did they go? I was just on the phone with them not too long ago. We had coffee the other day. What do you mean they are gone?
When you grieve someone you are not just grieving the person, you are also grieving who you were when you were with them. So, in a sense, yes, you lose a part of yourself too. Aspects of yourself then become a ghost.
The novel is imbued with so much of your own experience with grief. I imagine that might have been therapeutic, but also challenging. How did you approach fictionalizing what you’d gone through?
I cared for my father in at-home hospice as he was dying. It’s traumatic to watch someone you love so much wither away from cancer. It’s traumatic to be so active in the death process and to watch it unfold, to be witness to not only how the human body slowly shuts down, but what happens to one’s mind during that time, their varying states of consciousness.
I fictionalized it by making the dying person the main character’s mother, instead of father. Additionally, I wrote any death and dying scenes as flashbacks and kept those to a minimum in order to create some emotional distance for myself.
Grieving can be very psychical – insomnia, hallucinations, joint pain. I feel like the novel calls into question how many ghost stories may have originated from someone simply coping with the physical side effects of loss. Does Vanishing Daughters encourage readers to rethink the ghost stories we all grew up hearing?
I don’t think we do a very good job in American culture of processing grief. So much pain and trauma is stored in our bodies, and if we’re not resting, or finding time to be good to our bodies by stretching or moving and fueling ourselves with nutritious foods the physiological effects can become evident. This stress from grief can also manifest itself as sleep disturbances, and if you’re not sleeping or sleeping well, you can very well experience auditory or visual hallucinations.
Many of us are still working while grieving. I was. So, I was grieving, while also managing the day-to-day stress of work and life and family. That’s a lot on anyone. I had developed a number of health issues during that time which seemed to compact even further what I was experiencing and when I visited my physician, he quickly identified that all of my health ailments at that time were a part of the grieving process. When I asked him what I needed to do to get better he said I needed time, and he was right. I just needed time to process it all and to be good to myself.
Of course this is life, I’m in my 40s. I know I’ll continue to lose people. I had lost many people even before my dad, but I think what made it that much more difficult was caring for someone so sick whom I loved very much. I’m finding myself now in a position where I’m once again caring for someone I love very much who has very serious health issues. I don’t know what will happen, but I know at least that I love them very much and if I want to do my best caring for them I myself have to be healthy as well, mentally and physically.
So, this is just a long way of saying that yes, I do think that intense stress and grief have probably been causes of someone’s manifestations of the ghost of a loved one, or strange sounds in a house, or waking up in the middle of the night feeling as if something were pressing down on their chest. Our minds and our bodies are so very delicate, and we have to be gentle with ourselves.
When you grieve someone you are not just grieving the person, you are also grieving who you were when you were with them. So, in a sense, yes, you lose a part of yourself too. Aspects of yourself then become a ghost.
Bri’s mother is quite superstitious, but Bri is more of a skeptic. While reading I found myself wondering how much of superstition is just grief transfigured, and how much of skepticism is just avoiding grief. What was it like to explore the superstitions we hold around death?
I think ultimately no one can answer what, if anything, happens when we die. Even from a scientific standpoint, there are a series of physical markers we look to in order to pronounce someone dead, their heart stops, brain activity ceases, and so on. Yet, beyond that, what do we really know?
We have no clue where consciousness comes from. In terms of the human brain, there is still so much about it we do not know.
So, I personally think some superstitions are just tools to help people navigate the world and the questions they do not have answers to.
I enjoyed presenting a number of questions we have around death. I also enjoyed highlighting how in some instances we’re still so careful to speak of death or acknowledge it. Again, I think it’s because so much still remains unknown, and deep down, we all know we’re going to die, and that’s scary for most people to think about. Yet, it’s the single guarantee in life that we all have.
Bri theorizes about energy quite a bit – death as just another state of being, a person’s life simply changing form. As a skeptic yourself, does this approach to death feel more realistic or comforting to you?
I don’t think I’m a skeptic in what one would traditionally call a skeptic. I did return to my previous religion after my father died, even though I do challenge my religious institution on many stances as I believe in protecting women’s rights, protecting trans kids, protecting LGBTQ+ rights, and that science is real and so on.
I don’t believe in heaven or hell, that’s for certain.
After my dad died and after writing this book, I had a few experiences that were quite comforting and changed my perspective.
I personally do not think we end. I think we’re all energy and energy can never be destroyed, that’s a fundamental principle of physics. Energy can only be transformed, changed into another thing. What that other thing will be once I cease to exist in this form, who knows. Maybe just pure consciousness. Maybe merged into the consciousness of every single person who has ceased to exist as well? Who knows?
Rose House itself has so much personality; it’s basically one of the main characters in the novel. Why characterize a haunted house as “a loving thing”?
It’s hard for me to believe that a family could live in a house for so long and that if it were to become haunted that it would become this scary thing. I think of Rose House like a mother, in a way. It cared for these people who lived within its walls. So why would it ever want to frighten them, or their descendants? It makes much more sense for the house to just know all of them, to sense them, to want to help guide them and keep them safe, especially if this is their ancestral home.
I enjoyed presenting a number of questions we have around death. I also enjoyed highlighting how in some instances we’re still so careful to speak of death or acknowledge it.
Thin places – dreams, mirrors, meditative states, cemeteries, purgatory – play an important role in the novel. What do we gain from believing in ghosts, from peering into thin places, from being “open and receptive to all possibilities”?
I think by being open to the possibility that there is so much we don’t have answers to that it’s freeing. It also allows us to really recognize how truly miraculous it is to be alive. We don’t have to go and look for magic and possibility and wonder. Our very existence is magical and wondrous. Also, in just being open and receptive that we are energetic beings, and that energy, our own energy, has the possibility of influencing the world around us. This means, whatever state you’re in now, if you’re in a state of gratitude or happiness or love right now, those will generally be the types of experiences you will be on the lookout for. I’m of the belief that where attention goes energy flows. The things that you place your attention on are what grows in your life.
Several objects in the novel stand out as talismans – Aurora’s copy of The Sleeping Beauty of the Wood, the spindle, the radios. These objects carry memories and relay messages, their energies transcend time. How do objects play a role in keeping someone’s memory alive?
I love special objects. I love visiting antique stores and walking the aisles and telling myself the story of the person who owned those things. I think there are items that can be so imbued with a person’s energy that that item itself carries a fingerprint of that person. That’s, in part, why we house precious items in museums. Yes, that actual artifact is wonderful, but the story of the person who made it, held it, used it, is extraordinary as well. I can stand at a museum in front of a work by someone who crafted it hundreds, thousands of years ago. That’s powerful and magical and helps us to reflect on the life and legacy of the person behind it.
The novel is concerned with breaking patterns, specifically in violence against women. When we talk about women whose lives were cut short, what kinds of harmful cycles get proliferated? How does Vanishing Daughters attempt to break these cycles?
In Vanishing Daughters, I wanted to make the argument, specifically with the folklore of the vanishing hitchhiker, that the vanishing hitchhiker is sometimes a woman. This folklore exists across the United States and the world. What I find striking is that it’s often portrayed as a monstrous woman, this apparition. Well, ghost stories are often rooted in the death of someone, and I started thinking, what if the vanishing hitchhiker was a murder victim and we’re just continuing to victimize her by making her a monster in death?
In the United States, we have an epidemic of missing and murdered women. Many of these cases don’t have the resources or proper care they deserve and too often these cases go cold. Especially when it comes to women of color or trans women we see a lack of attention when crimes are committed against them.
And generally, why is that? Why are we alright as a society that allows horrible things to happen to women?
We very often expect women to be nice, to be passive, to be pleasant, and why? That just allows abusers and criminals to gain access quickly and hurt and harm. We then shame and demonize women who are assertive and protective of their peace and space.
I can stand at a museum in front of a work by someone who crafted it hundreds, thousands of years ago. That’s powerful and magical and helps us to reflect on the life and legacy of the person behind it.
Vanishing Daughters questions why certain deaths, particularly womens’, are remembered as cautionary tales or ghost stories. Why did you want to interrogate this?
Women are completely picked apart in life, from adolescents through old age. We’re never skinny enough, fat enough, pretty enough, smart enough, successful enough, helpful enough, enough, enough, enough.
It’s insane that people feel they can so easily critique a woman’s life at any which stage, for any which item.
Then, don’t be a murder victim, because then those questions don’t end –
What was she wearing?
Who was she with?
Why was she out so late?
So much blame is placed on women for literally existing and then once we cease to exist, blame is still placed.
And then when thinking about some of the unsolved cases of murdered women in the Chicago area that I covered in Vanishing Daughters, I saw that recurring pattern of women being literally blamed for their own deaths. We blame the victim for being killed and don’t blame the murderer for what they are, a monster.
Cynthia Pelayo is the Bram Stoker Award–winning author of Forgotten Sisters, Children of Chicago, and The Shoemaker’s Magician. In addition to writing genre-blending novels that incorporate fairy-tale, mystery, detective, crime, and horror elements, Pelayo has written numerous short stories, including the collection Lotería, and the poetry collection Crime Scene. The recipient of the 2021 International Latino Book Award, she holds a master of fine arts in writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She lives in Chicago with her family. For more information, visit www.cinapelayo.com.
