Alejandra doesn’t know who she is anymore. She’s a wife to her husband, a mother to her children, a daughter to her mother. They simply cannot see who she has become as a terrible darkness threatens to consume her. And they certainly cannot see what Alejandra sees. The ghostly visions … a woman crying in a ragged white gown.
With the help of a therapist, Alejandra begins digging into her family’s history. She starts looking into the biological mother she never knew. The deeper she goes into the women in her family, the more she finds heartbreak and tragedy much like her own.
Her ancestors saw the crying woman too. She is La Llorona, the vengeful mother of Mexican legend. La Llorona will not stop until Alejandra follows in the same dark footsteps as her mother, and her grandmother. And though she has inherited the pain of generations, Alejandra also inherited their strength and courage, and she’ll have to use every ounce of those traits to destroy La Llorona forever.
Why we’re excited about this book:
V. Castro has been setting the horror fiction world on fire since her first book release just a few years ago. The author of Goddess of Filth, Mestiza Blood, The Queen of the Cicadas, and Out of Aztlan, among others, Castro is also the author of Aliens: Vasquez, a novel set in the Alien franchise featuring PFC Jenette Vasquez from the film Aliens. Her short fiction has been featured in such anthologies as Worst Laid Plans: an Anthology of Vacation Horror and Lockdown: Stories of Crime, Terror, and Hope During a Pandemic. With her latest, Castro takes on the curse of La Llorona with a tragic and heartbreaking tale of a woman struggling with her own personal darkness. Sarah Langan (Good Neighbors) calls The Haunting of Alejandra “A powerful story about motherhood, trauma, love, and the ways that myths can and should be rewritten . . . If you’re a horror fan and you haven’t picked up V. Castro, you need to fix that.”, and Clay McLeod Chapman (Ghost Eaters) says: “V. Castro charts a terrifying legacy of tears with The Haunting of Alejandra, an empathic epic that maps out the birth of a curse and tethers itself to the very ancestry of its tragic protagonist.”
Forthcoming from Del Rey 18 April 2023, The Haunting of Alejandra by V. Castro is available to pre-order now.
BOB PASTORELLA