Monstrilio

Grieving mother Magos cuts out a piece of her deceased eleven-year-old son Santiago’s lung. Acting on fierce maternal instinct and the dubious logic of an old folktale, she nurtures the lung until it gains sentience, growing into the carnivorous little Monstrilio she keeps hidden within the walls of her family’s decaying Mexico City estate.

Eventually, Monstrilio begins to resemble the Santiago he once was, but his innate impulses― though curbed by his biological and chosen family’s communal care― threaten to destroy this fragile second chance at life.

A thought-provoking meditation on grief, acceptance, and the monstrous sides of love and loyalty, Gerardo Sámano Córdova blends bold imagination and evocative prose with deep emotional rigor. Told in four acts that span the globe from Mexico to Brooklyn to Berlin, Monstrilio offers, with uncanny clarity, a cathartic and precise portrait of being human.

“Gerardo Sámano Córdova’s dark, soulful magic puts me in mind of Kelly Link or Carmen Maria Machado (and further back, Mary Shelley). The horror of grief has rarely been so viscerally or movingly evoked.” ― Peter Ho Davis, author of A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself

“Haunting and often bleakly humorous, Gerardo Sámano Córdova’s Monstrilio is a captivating tone poem of trauma, grief, and transformation. Córdova writes with the lyrical precision of a master surrealist and creates an uncompromising vision of literary horror that is so wholly unique and utterly his own.” ― Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

“Monstrilio inhabits an interstitial space among smart horror, folklore, literary fiction and the kind of weird, often multicultural narratives that usually get labelled magical realism for lack of a better term… Sámano Córdova has created an outstanding debut; for all the ground being broken in genre-bending horror, his is a distinctive, exciting new voice in fiction.” ― Los Angeles Times

“A Promethean fable about reconstruction, reinvention, and the occasional human-sized snack.” ― Kirkus Reviews