The doll was never just a decoration. Neither is this novel.

Muñeca, Cynthia Gómez’s debut novel from G.P. Putnam’s Sons, set it in 1968, the year Oakland was refusing to stay still. A bruja, a bespelled heiress, a household built on colonial wealth, and a romance conducted in Scrabble tiles: this is Latine Gothic horror doing exactly what the best Gothic horror has always done, turning the house inside out to show you what’s been living in the walls.

Muñeca by Cynthia Gómez Review: Latine Gothic Horror at Its Sharpest

Before Violeta Miramontes can walk or speak, she communicates through the arrangement of Scrabble tiles. That image alone tells you what kind of book you are holding: precise in its cruelty, unexpectedly tender, and utterly committed to finding language where language has been taken away.

Muñeca is Cynthia Gómez’s debut novel, published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons, and it lands in 1968 Oakland with the confidence of a writer who has been circling this story for years. Set against the collapse and revolution of that particular American moment, it follows Natalia Fuentes, a working-class bruja who hears rumours about the beautiful Violeta Miramontes, heiress to the kind of Spanish colonial wealth that carries its own particular rot.

Violeta has been left paralysed by what looks like an illness and what Nati immediately recognises as a curse. Armed with a plan to infiltrate the Miramontes household as Violeta’s caretaker, earn a reward, break the spell, and get out clean, Nati sets in motion something she absolutely cannot control.

She never gets out clean. But then, that was never really the point.

Gothic horror works best when the dread comes from two directions at once, and Muñeca understands this instinctively. On one side, there is the supernatural: the curse itself, the dark magic that holds Violeta still, the ghosts Nati carries from her own past that keep pressing closer the deeper she gets into the Miramontes house. On the other side sits something arguably less escapable, the architecture of class and colonial inheritance, the way that wealth built on extraction and theft warps everything it touches, including the people trapped inside it.

Gómez builds atmosphere through accumulation rather than shock. The Miramontes household arrives in layers, each visit pulling back another corner of its gilded surface to reveal the structural decay beneath. It is a slow burn in the best sense: not sluggish, but deliberate, the way heat builds inside a sealed room. The pacing has the rhythm of a fairy tale transplanted into a real political moment, compressed and slightly heightened, but grounded enough in the textures of late-1960s Oakland that the surrealism earns its keep. When the horror turns sharp, it turns fast.

Reading Muñeca feels like pressing your palm against a cold wall and feeling something press back. The dread is quiet, close, and personal. This is not the horror of monsters from outside, but the horror of systems from within, of family secrets, inherited power, and the very specific danger of falling in love with someone whose world is designed to consume people like you.

Gómez writes with the economy of someone trained in short fiction, where every sentence carries weight or it gets cut. Her prose in Muñeca reads like silverwork: fine, deliberate, functional as decoration but sharp enough to draw blood. She does not over-describe. She trusts the image. Where another writer might spend a paragraph establishing the grandeur of the Miramontes house, Gómez finds the one detail that tells you everything about the power it represents, and she moves on.

The POV stays close to Nati throughout, which is a structural choice that shapes everything. We know exactly what Nati knows, suspect what she suspects, and feel the ground shift whenever new information arrives because we are receiving it in real time, through her particular lens. Nati is sharp, pragmatic, not especially sentimental, and carrying more damage than she lets on. That combination makes her a reliable guide into an unreliable situation. Her voice, dry and clear and occasionally darkly funny, provides the tension between what the novel shows and what she is willing to admit to herself.

The communication between Nati and Violeta, first through a system of blinking and later through the arrangement of Scrabble tiles, is one of the book’s finest structural inventions. It forces both characters into a kind of radical attentiveness to each other. Violeta is rendered visible through constraint, made vivid precisely because she must work so hard to be heard. And Nati, who came in with a plan and a professional distance, has no armor against that level of deliberate communication. The romance that grows from it does not feel rushed; it feels inevitable in the way that things are inevitable when two people are paying that much attention to each other under that much pressure.

Dialogue elsewhere in the novel works hard and stays lean. Gómez has a gift for the line that arrives sideways, that does two things at once, revealing character while advancing tension. Chapter construction shows the same efficiency: scenes end on the kind of note that makes you realize you have been holding your breath for the last three pages.

Muñeca is, at its marrow, a novel about who pays the costs of other people’s power. Violeta is trapped inside a wealth that was built through colonial extraction, the Spanish colonial inheritance the Miramontes family carries is not incidental but structural, a source of both their status and the rot that has seeped into their bloodline across generations. The curse at the center of the novel is not a random attack; it comes from somewhere, from someone with reasons, and Gómez is interested in those reasons as much as she is in the spell itself.

Nati occupies the opposite side of that class divide. Working-class, Latine, a bruja who has kept her craft practical and mercenary because survival doesn’t leave much room for principle. Her journey through the novel is not simply a rescue mission; it is a reckoning with what she has suppressed in herself, in her own history, in her relationship to power and to magic. The ghosts she is forced to face are her own, and their arrival is handled with the same quiet precision that Gómez brings to everything else.

The novel’s queer romance sits at the intersection of these class and colonial tensions without reducing either character to a symbol. Nati and Violeta’s relationship develops inside a system that confines them both, though differently, and the question of whether love can exist inside such a system, whether it changes anything, whether it asks too much, runs beneath every scene they share. Gómez does not offer easy answers. She does not simplify the morality. She lets her characters sit in their anger and their desire and their desperation simultaneously, which is what gives the novel its emotional weight.

The 1968 setting is not decorative. Oakland in that year was one of the most politically charged cities in America. The Black Panthers, founded locally in 1966, were at their peak in terms of membership and influence, representing exactly the kind of organised resistance against entrenched power that the novel engages with thematically. The Chicano movement was gathering force. The idea that working-class people of color, using collective power, could push back against systems designed to contain them saturates the air of the novel’s world, even when it stays in the background. When Nati reaches for magic, she reaches for it in that context, in a moment when the city itself was refusing to stay still.

Her novelette “The Shivering World,” published in Split Scream Volume Two in 2022, introduced the Faustian bargain as her structural template: a young woman, Nayeli, navigating poverty and gentrification in Oakland, encounters what may be La Llorona and acquires power at a cost she cannot fully calculate in advance. The folkloric register, the class consciousness, the female protagonist who is brilliant and constrained by forces beyond her individual capacity to resist, all of it is present in miniature form.

The Nightmare Box and Other Stories, her debut collection from Cursed Morsels Press in 2024, expanded that template across twelve stories and confirmed what “The Shivering World” had suggested. All twelve center ordinary people, Latine, queer, working-class, wielding supernatural powers against the structures that oppress them.

The collection is set almost entirely in Oakland, and reads as a love letter to the city in its most radical register. Gómez described her work to NightTide Magazine as “anti-capitalist spec fiction that deals with revenge and resistance and ghosts and what happens when oppressed people fight back using magic.” A friend put it even better, she quoted them in the same interview: her stories “explore the monsters the world tries to make of brown women.”

Muñeca takes all of that and stretches it across a novel-length canvas for the first time. The shift from short to long form shows in the pacing, which trusts the reader more than short fiction can afford to, and in the romantic subplot, which has the space to develop into something that earns its weight.

But the core commitments have not shifted. This is still a book about power and who gets to hold it, about magic as resistance, about the specific costs exacted from women who refuse the boxes they are placed in. What the novel adds is interiority: Nati is the most fully realized protagonist Gómez has built, and the room the novel format gives her allows a character study that the shorter work could only gesture toward.

The move to G.P. Putnam’s Sons represents a significant increase in distribution and reach, but the book has not softened to meet a mainstream audience. If anything, it has sharpened.

The obvious comparison, one that several advance blurbers reach for, is Silvia Moreno-Garcia, whose Mexican Gothic established that this subgenre could land on bestseller lists and critical shortlists simultaneously. The comparison has merit in terms of atmosphere and the deployment of inherited colonial horror as literal supernatural threat. But Gómez’s class politics are harder, her prose leaner, and her protagonist considerably less comfortable than Moreno-Garcia’s more socially positioned heroines.

Carmen Maria Machado’s formal adventurousness is another touchstone, particularly in the way Muñeca uses constraint, both Violeta’s physical constraint and the constraint of the setting, as a structuring principle rather than a limitation. The book has also drawn comparisons to Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle for its closed domestic world and its scrutiny of the damage done by inherited circumstance. The Jackson comparison is most useful when thinking about atmosphere, the way a house becomes a character with its own agenda, but Gómez’s engagement with race and class gives Muñeca a political dimension that Jackson was not interested in.

Most Gothic fiction uses its historical settings as mood, the past as a place where horror feels more permissible. Gómez uses 1968 Oakland as an argument. The uprising happening outside the Miramontes house is not backdrop; it is the novel’s political conscience, the context that gives its themes about power and resistance their full meaning.

When Nati’s magic fails or spirals or demands more than she planned to give, it fails inside a world that is itself in the process of being remade, and that proximity to real collective transformation gives the personal horror an uncommon resonance, through characters who feel real enough to hurt, through a story that understands that the most frightening thing is rarely the monster, but the system that conjured it.

The doll at the centre of this novel is not just a title. It is everything Gómez has been thinking about: what it means to be made into something decorative and contained by forces that claim to love you, and what it costs to refuse to stay still.

Muñeca by Cynthia Gómez is published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons on June 2, 2026.

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.