Oakland in 1968 crackled with the kind of energy that only exists when a city is going critical. The Black Panther Party was organising breakfast programmes and armed patrols barely a mile from where U.C. Berkeley students had recently won the fight for free speech. Strikes for ethnic studies rippled across the Bay.

Liberation movements erupted from Paris to Mexico City, and in the cramped apartments and Victorian houses of Oakland, working-class people of colour were quietly, furiously, building lives that rejected every assumption the ruling class held about them. Cynthia Gómez has spent the better part of twenty-seven years calling that city home, and in her debut novel she reaches back into its most turbulent year and pulls out a story that could not belong anywhere else.

That novel is Muñeca, a surreal queer Gothic arriving June 2, 2026 from G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Gómez is not a newcomer to horror readers who have been paying attention. Her first story collection, The Nightmare Box and Other Stories, arrived in 2024 from Cursed Morsels Press and promptly earned a reputation as a magic-soaked love letter to Oakland, brimming with feminist rage and populated by ordinary Latine, queer, and working-class people who wield supernatural powers against the forces that would crush them. 

Her queer vampire tale “Lips Like Sugar” landed on the 2024 Ignyte Award shortlist for Best Short Story. Her short fiction has appeared in Fantasy Magazine, Strange Horizons, Pseudopod, and Nightmare Magazine, among others. She is a Tin House and VONA alumnus. She describes her own work, without flinching, as “feminist, anti-capitalist, queer, Latine horror.” There is no hedging there, no polite softening for a marketplace that might prefer its politics served lukewarm.

Cynthia Gómez: On Muñeca, Queer Gothic Horror, and Writing Oakland’s Magic

Muñeca is described as a “surreal Gothic” set in 1968 Oakland. What drew you to this specific time and place? How does the city’s history, particularly its social and political climate, act as a character or catalyst in this story?

I’ve always wanted to set a story in 1968 Oakland. It was a year when the old world refused to admit it was dying, and kept trying to kill the rising new world, and failing, again and again. That struggle and tension makes for lots of great stories, and particularly Gothic stories.

In the late 1960s, women in the U.S. still faced a lot of legal constraints—no-fault divorce was not a thing, and women’s rights to abortion or even a bank account totally varied by geography—and also a lot of social constraints, such as the stigma of divorce and the complete acceptance of sexual harassment. No matter Violeta’s wealth and position, she is confined by these extreme restrictions. In fact, it’s exactly that wealth and position, and her family’s obsession with keeping both, that have made Violeta so vulnerable to harm.

And yet 1968 was also a time of tremendous social change, a lot of it coming from Oakland and the Bay Area. The murder of MLK brought national rebellions in April; in that same month, more than 1,000 people marched against the murder of Black Panther Bobby Hutton. Strikes for ethnic studies were happening in 1968 in San Francisco, just across the Bay Bridge; the Free Speech Movement had happened at U.C. Berkeley only four years before. And that’s all in the context of liberation struggles all over the world, from Paris to Mexico City to Tokyo, that were happening in that very year. 

So when Nati comes into the home of this incredibly retrograde, racist family, she’s bringing a lot of 1968 with her, in her own way. She’s got her queer found family and her songs from the civil rights movement and her class-conscious politics and The Autobiography of Malcolm X (camouflaged inside a copy of Rebecca.) She represents a very real threat to that family’s entire order, a threat they don’t even really notice, because she’s just one of the help. 

The novel centres on a working-class witch entering the world of a wealthy heiress. How do you use witchcraft and the supernatural to explore themes of class, colonial wealth, and resistance to oppression?

In this novel, from the second Nati steps into that house, she’s vulnerable. The family wields far more economic, political, legal, and social weight than she’ll ever be able to wield, as a brown-skinned woman in a working-class job. If Nati wants to defend herself against them –  to say nothing of trying to liberate their daughter – the only way for her is through wielding magical powers. 

But those magical powers come with layers of danger, including for the person who wields them. Nati tells herself that she’s just going to that house to break a spell and free Violeta. But she’s also bringing a lot of her own righteous fury at these people, at their bigotry, at the way they treat their servants.

She knows just how much human suffering went into building all their wealth. To quote Nati’s mother, “There’s misery in every beautiful thing in this house.” Nati is incredibly drawn to spells that might unleash that misery, spells made stronger by her own fury. But revenge isn’t liberation, and it might feel good, but it comes with a cost. To quote her mother again: “You’re a good person, Natalia. Don’t you want to stay that way?” 

The relationship between Nati and Violeta is core to the plot, with Nati becoming “reckless” as feelings bloom. How did you approach writing a Gothic romance that also serves as a “razor-sharp examination of deep-rooted issues”?

I knew that I really wanted Nati to come into this story as someone who doesn’t need anything from Violeta – or from anyone, really. She has her own life, her own community, her own dalliances with women. So that when she comes into the Miramontes home, she’s coming from a position of strength (even as she’s also vulnerable and in danger.) Nati’s whole life is a rejection of their rapacious morality; not just their obsession with status and privilege and the racial bigotry that come along with it, but also the idea that women are, to use Nati’s words, only good for “giving parties or making babies or managing the crumbling house.”

Her values come through in how she treats Violeta differently than Violeta’s own family ever has: she asks for permission before moving or touching her; she brings in calendars so Violeta can have some sense of time passing while she’s in that purgatorial sick room. That’s a pretty strong subversion of the typical Gothic figure who’s almost always completely vulnerable and dependent on the wealthy figures in her life.

Nati’s also got a little bit of the hustler in her. As the novel opens, she sees Violeta as a  real person who deserves freedom, sure, but also as a means to a handsome reward. And, for Violeta, Nati represents the only possible means to freedom, which kind of poses its own dangers. As Nati herself says, “If I were in [Violeta’s] place, I’d promise anything right now. Later I’d worry about whether I could keep it.”

Whether these two women can trust each other, and whether they can keep their promises, is at least partly tied to what they have to lose or gain, and that’s tied to their respective class positions. But it’s also one of the sources of dramatic tension that I wanted to use to drive this book. 

“Muñeca” translates to “doll.” How does this title reflect the novel’s exploration of agency, control, and the roles women, especially queer, Latine women, are expected to play within different societal structures?

At the novel’s opening, Violeta is basically a living doll in her bed, unable to move or communicate. And, even before that happened to her, she spent her whole life being treated like a doll, even by her own family, including her husband, to be moved and manipulated wherever is most convenient for them. Which is exactly how so many women have been treated for the vast majority of human existence. And, again 1968 saw the very earliest beginnings of what would become the women’s liberation movement, and when Nati comes into the house, she’s aiming to liberate Violeta, in more than one sense of the word.

I also just really love working with dolls in fiction; this marks the third time that I’ve written a story with a doll or figurine that plays into the plot. Dolls are how little girls practice how to maintain relationships, host social gatherings (aka tea parties) and practice for the future roles of wives and mothers that they’re expected to carry out. They’re associated with femininity, so in turn they’re associated with weakness. I got a chance to subvert that a little in this book, although I won’t spoil it for the reader by mentioning exactly how.

Nati’s witchcraft is described as being passed down “from my mother, and her mother.” How did you envision this magical system? Is it rooted in specific cultural practices or memories, and how does it differ from the more abstract, potentially exploitative power represented by the heiress Violeta’s world?

I invented all of the spells in this book; none of them is based on anyone’s actual practices or traditions, at least as far as I know. Writing the spells was one of my favorite parts in the book, because they draw on emotion and work deeply in metaphor, but they also need to follow structure and… well, logic. How do you spark the spell? How do you tell it whom to work on? When should it start and stop? None of this is stuff that you’ll want to get wrong.

It’s really cool to be asked about the contrast between the kind of power Nati wields and the power represented by Violeta’s world. For me, that’s encapsulated in the way that, in one of the crucial spells that Nati uses, she makes sure to ask permission first. And that simple step – of empathy – may be the crucial ingredient that gives that spell its tremendous power. 

The classic Gothic often centred on imperilled heroines and threatening patriarchs. How does placing a complex, queer romance at the heart of this story fundamentally subvert or reinvent the emotional and narrative expectations of the genre?

In some ways, Nati is in the classic “vulnerable figure in a liminal class position” that’s so typical of the Gothic (the governess and the companion are classic examples.) Patriarchy and danger loom over her everywhere; the family has power over her that they could exercise any time they want, by virtue of her gender and skin color and class (never mind the possibility of them finding out she’s queer, or finding out what she’s up to with her little spell box.)

But, as I alluded to earlier, she’s not the typical imperilled heroine, and I had a lot of fun with that difference. She’s got her found family, which is a much more liberatory family model than the nuclear family, at least as practiced by the Del Valle/Miramontes clan. When she enters that house she’s already got a job and a home and a found family that she can go back to any time. And also she could murder all of them in their sleep and never get caught. 

In the best Gothic tales, personal transformation comes at a cost. For Nati, what is the true “price” of her magic and her growing intimacy with Violeta? Is it a loss of innocence, a confrontation with a darker self, or a necessary sacrifice for liberation?

WARNING: This answer contains spoilers for Muñeca (and for the movie Bound, which I can’t recommend enough.)

Proceed if you don’t mind having the whole book spoiled. So: that whole “price paying” thing was a Gothic element that I basically rejected. Instead I borrowed the convention of heist movies, like Bound, where – I told you this had spoilers !!! – the characters risk everything and they get away with it.

Yes, Nati does discover – or does she merely unleash? – a side of herself that is much darker than she ever thought, and she has to contend with whether she really can control that side of herself, or if she even wants to. There is room, in other words, for the interpretation that Nati pays a price for what she ends up getting. But I don’t think she does, really.

I think she’s stronger for having reconnected with her magical powers (instead of trying to keep them in a box) and for having forged a conscious relationship with those powers, choosing her own limits and her own magical moral code. Whether she ends up willing and able to stay within those limits… is beyond the scope of this book. (And ripe material for a sequel if I ever went that route.) 

Before Muñeca, you published The Nightmare Box and Other Stories and many standalone pieces. How did writing short fiction prepare you for the novel form? Were there themes or character types from your short work that found a fuller expression in this book?

I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was seven years old. But I spent years not really dedicating myself to it, filling notebooks and then Google Docs with ideas that I never produced. In 2019 I started dedicating myself to writing in earnest, and I started out with short stories.

It was just a more manageable way for me to learn how to write; I knew I didn’t have the skills or, frankly, the stamina to spend months on a single project, like a novel, while I was also learning the craft itself. Putting together a story collection was my first long-term goal, and it took four years; once I tackled that, I decided I was ready to tackle a long-term work, such as a novella.

In terms of themes and character types… Well, I  wrote a story about a writer who summons a god that can take on the form of a puppet or a figurine. And the title story in my collection is about a young witch in Oakland in 1970, named Serena, who gets paid to give horrible nightmares to victims she’s never met, and she doesn’t concern herself too much with what happens to them afterwards.

Then something happens that makes her start to wonder who she’s really working for and if she’s really okay with what she’s being used for. Those questions – what happens if marginalized people have access to supernatural powers; what they might use those powers for; if it’s possible to wield those powers without losing the morality and empathy that make us human – are ones that I played with all throughout that collection, and they absolutely show up in Muñeca. 

One of your first published stories, “The Hallway,” involves a queer protagonist, photographs, and supernatural consequences. Looking back, do you see a throughline from that early story to the themes of memory, loss, and haunting in Muñeca?

What a blast from the past! (2014, to be specific.) It was my first published story, the first time I let myself write horror fiction, instead of the literary fiction I’d been trying to write before. When I look back on it, I can see so many of the elements that keep working their way into my fiction: queer Latine protagonists, the shadow of family relationships, loneliness and loss… and what happens when you add the supernatural into all that.

Of course I wasn’t trying, at that time, to find those things; I was just trying to have fun writing a story about a supernatural power that ends of feeding on her own loneliness and feeling of loss and betrayal.

You’ve described your work as “feminist, anti-capitalist, queer, Latine horror”. How do you balance the desire to tell “dark and frightening” stories with the need for catharsis and, as you’ve said, giving oppressors consequences?

So, I wrote an essay about Carrie last year, where I said, “​In Carrie, the bullies get turned into ash. In the real world, they get elected president.” In our world, as fascism consolidates itself all around us, like a very stupid black hole with claws, life is very often dark and frightening. So much of our fears are huge and cosmic and existential: Will I get picked up by the masked secret police because I told one of them to ‘go get some lunch, big boy?’

Will my friends be jailed for peeing while trans? And then sometimes it’s even worse, because it’s mundane and ridiculous and insulting, like: Will my medicine or my food kill me, now that they’ve gutted the FDA? This is in addition to watching tremendous atrocities and destruction being meted out so quickly that for all I know the U.S. will have set its claws into another country by the time this interview appears.

 In that scenario, it’s cathartic, often even healing, to let out a tiny bit of that tension by reading about a fictional world where sometimes the assholes get consequences. I’m very fond of saying that we don’t need revenge; we need a whole new world. But we live in this one, and in this one, it can feel hella good – to use an Oakland phrase – to see some of the fictional bad guys get a little bit of what they dish out. The only petards they get hoisted on, however, are their own. To quote one of my own characters: “Don’t start no shit, won’t be no shit.” Exactly, Roberto. Exactly.

You’ve spoken about initially feeling pressured to write about the immigrant experience before centring characters who are “Latine, in various stages of queer… and mostly second or third-generation”, characters more like yourself. How did this personal and artistic shift shape the authenticity of Nati’s voice in Muñeca?

I think that the main thing I needed to do with writing was as much about who my protagonists were as who my audience was. Without realizing it, I was writing for an imagined audience that was mostly not Latine, and that might associate Latine stories with immigration, since that’s so much of what dominates the news cycles and even when we every once in a while get a movie made about us.

Over time, I came to realize this and made a choice to think consciously about how my idea reader is, and to write for them. With Muñeca, for example, the core audience I was writing to were Latine women who grew up reading Gothic stories, like me. Everyone else is invited to our party, but it is our party. I think that when we writers figure out who our ideal readers are, that can make for a story that really sings.

You’ve cited Roald Dahl and Stephen King as early influences and named Rosemary’s Baby as your “comfort horror”. How do these classics of unease and paranoia inform your approach to building dread in a contemporary, culturally specific context?

Thank you for asking this; I could talk about Ira Levin all day. Speaking specifically of Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives: I am in awe of the way that he writes dread. It’s slow and inexorable and when we try to pinpoint later where its characters could have seen the danger and where they could have gotten out, there’s rarely a single example to point to. For every warning sign, there’s a good explanation, or at least an explanation that’s not the huge mental leap of “witchcraft” or “robots.”

And then there’s the fact that these women characters don’t really have a good way out, because they are financially dependent on their husbands (Joanna and Rosemary) or they’d lose custody of their children (Joanna.) That fact isn’t explicitly named; it’s just hanging over the characters’ lives and their decisions. The danger is absolutely coming from inside the house. 

That sense of domestic paranoia, the sense of being watched and surveilled, is what I wanted to tap into in Muñeca. And there is a very specific 1968 context – I’d argue that it’s pretty much true now, too – which informs Nati’s every move. From the moment she sets foot in that house to get hired as Violeta’s caretaker, she knows that she’s in real danger from Andrés, who considers it his right to sexually harass the women who work for him.

He could victimize her, or falsely accuse her of anything, and he’d be believed, because of the fact that she’s of a different gender, skin color, and class than he is. She knows it, and so does he, but, again, it’s never spoken of. It’s just looming over her, like the paintings of the Spanish ancestors in the hallway.

You’ve mentioned paying great attention to sentence cadence and ending on stressed syllables. How does this focus on the musicality of prose serve the emotional and eerie beats of a Gothic horror story?

What a delightful question! I hadn’t thought about cadence in the context of a Gothic story, but it’s definitely relevant. So… prose has meaning, yes, but wrapped into and around that meaning is the fact that it’s a whole bunch of sounds! And they’re so much fun to employ. For example: near the beginning of Muñeca, there’s a passage where Nati is remembering magic lessons at her grandmother’s house, and we have this sentence: “Sheets were nailed over the mold-frosted windows, and the room was thick with the dark and the damp.”

The first part of that sentence has sounds that are almost open and inviting: the word “sheets” has a soft sh and a nice open “ee” vowel sound to it, and there’s that nice crisp word “frost.” But  comes the “zh” sound in “windows;” it makes us slow down and pause, and there is where the sentence turns.

Now we get lots of hard consonants and single-syllable words, and the rhythm is staccato and brusque. There’s a lot of iambic meter, one of my favorites in poetry; it matches the rhythm of the human heart. I hear danger in that rhythm, and a sense of a warning, that matches the scene itself – because Grandma’s apartment does have its allure, but it’s full of danger. 

Oakland is not just your home but the primary setting for your work. What does the city give you as a writer that no other place could? You’ve expressed a wish to see it more on-screen. Does writing feel like a way to archive or mythologise your Oakland?

Oakland gives me so much as a human and as a writer – especially one who loves to write historical fiction –  and they all bleed in and out of each other. There are so many literary festivals and events, like Lit Crawl/LitQuake, the Bay Area Book Festival, Writers With Drinks, etc etc… In terms of archives alone, I’m surrounded by an embarrassment of riches: the Bay Area Lesbian Archives, the Bay Area GLBT Museum, the Oakland History Room, the African-American Museum and Library at Oakland, the Ethnic Studies and Bancroft Libraries at U.C. Berkeley, all of which have directly or indirectly supplied me with materials for my research.

Of course, lots of other cities have archives and rich history, but Oakland is mine. It’s where I’ve lived for the better part of 27 years. It’s Black and Southeast Asian and Latine and loud and queer and proud and full of art and protests and graffiti and activism and filmmakers from Ryan Coogler to Cheryl Dunye and Boots Riley. The country’s longest-running queer bar is right on the Oakland/Berkeley border. It’s got redwood trees everywhere, the closest thing I have to a spirit tree; I can drive thirty minutes and be at the Pacific ocean. I could keep going, but you get the idea. 

Re: what you said about writing as a way to mythologize or archive… that’s an intriguing way to think about it. Because while I don’t consciously think about it that way when writing historical fiction, for example, I do think that one of the most beautiful things about historical fiction is that it’s a way to bring history alive, the way it was experienced by human beings. Is that mythologizing, archiving, or both?

With Muñeca completing its journey to publication, where is your imagination pulling you next? Are you developing new novel-length ideas, or are you being called back to the short form to explore different “dark closets” of horror and dark fantasy?

I’ll always want to write short stories; there are just too many good ideas, not all of which need to be novel-length. (I’ve got two in anthologies that will hopefully both come out this year.) But some stories demand to be longer. I’m working now on another novel of historical fiction; I’ll say very little about it so as not to jinx it, but it will involve the garment industry in Oakland at the turn of the 20th century; labor activism; a possessed dress, and some gnarly body horror.

Muñeca by Cynthia Gómez

A vivid, surreal Gothic about a queer, Latine, working class witch who sets out to rescue a bespelled heiress and loses control of her powers and her heart in the process.

It is 1968 Oakland, and Natalia Fuentes has been hearing rumors about the beautiful Violeta Miramontes. The young heiress to Spanish colonial wealth has been left paralyzed by a mysterious illness. But Nati knows a thing or two about witchcraft, and she is certain that this is the work of dark magic.

Armed with a plan to break the spell and earn a handsome reward, Nati works her way into the house as Violeta’s caretaker, and immediately discovers her suspicions are true. But who cursed Violeta? And why?

As feelings between the two women bloom into romance, Nati grows more and more reckless, and is forced to face her own ghosts— ones she hoped would stay gone forever.

Riveting and richly layered, Muñeca explores how far one will go to save the person they love—even if that means damning themselves. Cynthia Gómez fills her debut novel with moments that chill your bones and warm your heart, a razor-sharp examination of deep-rooted issues that will haunt readers long after the last page is turned.