Monstrilio

Monstrilio (2023) is Gerardo Sámano Córdova's bold, haunting debut — a literary horror novel about grief, love, and the monstrous shapes they can take.

When her eleven-year-old son Santiago dies, the grieving Magos cannot let go. Following the dubious logic of an old folktale, she cuts away a piece of his lung and nurtures it until it stirs to life, growing into a small, carnivorous creature she hides within her family's decaying Mexico City home. As the being she calls Monstrilio grows, it begins to resemble the boy she lost — but its hungers, curbed only by the care of a fractured, unconventional family, threaten the fragile second chance it represents.

Told in four voices — Magos, her friend Lena, her husband Joseph, and Monstrilio itself — and moving from Mexico City to Brooklyn to Berlin, the novel is a tender, unsettling meditation on loss, queerness, and what it means to be human. Strange and deeply felt, it reworks the Frankenstein myth into something wholly its own.