Novelist Isabel Cañas delivers gothic horror with a twist

We're marking Halloween and Dia De Los Muertos with a conversation with Mexican American author Isabel Cañas. She employs gothic frameworks and tropes with historical detail in her novels—a combination as terrifying as it is informative. In this podcast, we discuss her books The Hacienda which is frightening haunted house mystery set in Mexico soon after its War of Independence and Vampires of El Norte set in northern Mexico (now south Texas) during the Mexican American war. Cañas discusses the racial and ethnic disparities, the rigid class structures, and the gender dynamics at work in both of these eras and how  gothic tropes are fertile ground for these explorations. We also discuss the growth of Mexican gothic fiction more generally and the balancing act required to portray actual historical events and authentic experiences in genres that are deeply imaginative. Cañas also talks about her extensive research into the historical periods in which she sets her novels, the family histories she also drew upon, her own academic background in Medieval Islamic history, and what it was like to write two novels and a dissertation simultaneously.