78 books like The Queen of the Cicadas

Gabino Iglesias has become a phenomenon in horror through a lot of hustle and plain hard work. His 2022 novel cemented his reputation as the king of border horror.

This novel follows the fate of Mario, a man broken by debt due to his family’s crushing medical bills. With a failing marriage, he reluctantly takes a job as a hitman, agreeing to do one last job hijacking a cartel’s cash shipment before it can reach Mexico.

Mario reluctantly works with his meth-addicted friend and a cartel insider. To make this dangerous endeavor worse, enter supernatural horrors that shocked me—and I am not easily shocked.

Is there blood? Of course! Gore? Plenty! Monsters and demons? Yes! You are guaranteed to lose sleep after reading this novel.

This YA Horror novel is technically the sequel to Cardinal’s smash hit Five Midnights, which was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award, but I liked it even more than the original.

Category Five takes place in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria, and it dives into the real-life struggle with real estate developers trying to gobble up cheap, devasted properties. It also exposes the ghostly history left on nearby Vieques Island after the last Cat 5 storm that hit way back in 1926.

The book features a mixture of spooky and historical with an endearing cast of found family that make it a quick, fun read.

This YA Horror novel, by an Afro Dominican nonbinary author, won the prestigious Pura Belpré Award and was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award.

The Bronx setting is depicted with such grit (spanning decades), it’s practically a character in its own right. I loved how the novel tied together a twisted “game,” similar to an urban legend, with a real, and very dark chapter of NYC history. It will definitely appeal to true crime fans, like myself, and features likable teen characters that are also relatable to adult readers. 

Winner of the International Latino Book Awards, and a Bram Stoker Finalist, this adult horror novels tackles the history of Chicago, highlighting the local Latin community.

Children of Chicago twists the story of the Pied Piper, with clean prose and a quick pace. I especially loved the main character, a female Puerto Rican detective who breaks all the stereotypes of both cops and women in fiction.

It’s a supernatural horror tale for adults that will make you want to read the rest of Pelayo’s impressive work.

I had already sold my novel when my publisher highly recommended that I read this book, which—like my own novel—is a modern retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I devoured it in two sittings.

Tsai’s story is a biracial, queer, gender-fluid retelling that modernizes and expands Shelley’s themes of alienation and the dangers of unchecked scientific experimentation.

While Tsai explores such weighty themes as gender identity, racism, and medical ethics, there is no skimping on the horror that will haunt your dreams.

H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau, published in 1896, is one of his most intriguing—and frightening. Moreau has created human hybrid beings via surgical experimentation on live animals.

In Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s retelling of the Wells classic, she goes further than the original’s philosophical themes by exploring the political, sociological, and cultural conflicts that arise from colorism, colonialism, and sexism.

In a fascinating twist on Wells’s narrative, she sets her novel in 19th-century Mexico during the Caste War of Yucatán, when the indigenous Maya people rebelled against the Mexicans and Europeans who subjugated them to work their ranches and farms. 

She also centers much of her tale on Moreau’s hybrid beings. It is, quite simply, a thrilling novel that is as horrifying as it is thought-provoking.

When a bookseller handed Jordan Peele’s anthology to me, I smiled and said: “I’ll take it!” Perhaps best known for his hit film, Get Out, I trusted Peele’s sense of horror. And I was not disappointed.

This collection brings together 19 tales by some of our best Black horror writers. It begins with a hilarious and grim story by the great N. K. Jemisin about a Black cop who abuses his power with the help of supernatural visions that assist him in targeting his next victim.

The horror hits just keep coming as we read frightening tales by the likes of Lesley Nneka Arimah, Violet Allen, and L. D. Lewis. I would not be shocked if this anthology gets adapted as a television series.

There’s a special pleasure in reading novels set in the place you’ve long lived, and there’s also a special pleasure—at least for me!—in diving into subcultures with strong and strange beliefs. Owen Egerton delivers on both in Hollow. Set in the Austin far removed from tech money and hip new restaurants, Hollow follows Oliver Bonds, a former religious studies professor whose life unraveled after the death of his young son. Oliver finds distraction in Hollow Earth theory and the idea a whole different world lies inside the one we currently occupy. Hollow broke my heart in the best sort of way with its exploration of grief, regret, and the lengths we go to in order to survive being human.

In 1881, a reporter described Texas as a “vast wilderness” that was “infested by roaming Mexicans, rattlesnakes, and braying jackasses.”

In other words, it was a land calling for white people to settle, civilize, and supplant the “indolent” Mexican. I was jolted by this and other visceral literary snippets, which De Leon drew from nineteenth-century travelogues, letters, and newspaper articles.

The book exposes the power of the printed word in forming and perpetuating early Euro-American stereotypes claiming Mexican Americans in Texas were unpatriotic, mixed blood, lazy, immoral, and cruel. Writing in 1983, De Leon concluded that these attitudes had shifted into subtler modern racism.

Yet the lynching of Mexican Americans persists in the nation’s second-largest state, with more than 23 massacred in a white supremacist attack at an El Paso Walmart in 2019.

During a period when Mexican American women were seen as having only three possible roles in life, either as hypersexualized figures, maids, or beauty queens, this stirring biography uncovers how one Latina, Adela Sloss-Vento, broke the mold.

She had only a high school education—and one belatedly received at that, but Sloss-Vento became a public intellectual and a vital, though hidden figure in the emerging Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. Reading this stimulating biography, I found it easy to see Sloss-Vento (1901-1998), sitting at her kitchen table writing spirited columns and letters in defense of Mexican Americans to English and Spanish Texas newspaper editors.

Though Mexican American women didn’t begin entering into mainstream journalism jobs in any sizeable numbers until the 1980s, Sloss-Vento’s story shows how at least one Latina beat back the barriers and made her own way into print.