Vanishing Daughters by Cynthia Pelayo
Now that I have been podcasting and interviewing authors for a couple of years a new thing has started to happen. Towards the end of most interviews, I will say “What are you working on now” or “What is coming next?” I am starting to have the regular experience of getting to read those books and it is really fun. The latest example is Cynthia Pelayo’s latest, and as much as I enjoyed Forgotten Sisters, this one was even better.
Despite being marketed on the cover as a thriller, Cina’s Wheelhouse is a horror novel about haunted Chicago. That would be cool enough, Chicago is a city I have enjoyed visiting but Pelayo’s Chicago is haunted not just by ghosts but by the long specter of this strange history that has swirled around the Windy City. In the hands of a less talented storyteller this history would roll out in fake newspaper articles or prologues, but the characters in her novels are haunted by history and the information as much as the ghosts. Part of the vibe is the modern fairy tale, and as such Pelayo is building a reliable catalog. No surprise as she has Bram Stoker and Latino book awards on her shelf.
Vanishing Daughters has all the elements that she is known for while adding some subtle but meaningful Sci-fi elements. It is the story of Bri, a journalist whose mother died recently in her massive southside childhood home. Her mother had passed on obsessions with what she calls “thin” places, haunted places including their home, and one that will become important, Archer Avenue. The thin place nature of their home always affected her with nightmares just around the surface.
Those nightmares included visions of a serial killer, very similar to the deaths of fifty-one women around Chicago, Bri feels the killer behind her. As a horror fan who is also an archive nerd, I love how Pelayo’s vibe almost always includes musty old books and a story that depends on someone cracking those spines to get answers.
Two plots interweave as the killer is obsessed with the idea that he is putting his victims to sleep, so you can guess which fairy tale Pelayo is playing with her. He has his eyes set on Bri, and she gets closer to the truth of origin, tied directly to the real-life history of the city. Chicago is a city I find interesting, and this novel is horror, Chicago history all pulled together with a light sprinkle of sci-fi worked for me. As much as I liked Forgotten Sisters, I enjoyed this one even more. I had one nitpick that I will talk about in spoilers. If you want a recommendation before I get into light spoilers about the novel then yes, Read Vanishing Daughters if the elements I described interest you.
Now let's talk about a few parts that highlight why it works for me.
“My mother didn't really tell me what her favorite Chicago hauntings were, but it was easy to guess. In the library, she had an entire shelf dedicated to Archer Ave. There were Manila folders full of documents in pictures. When I asked her why she was so fascinated with a single road.”
Much like Stephen Graham Jones needed story reasons for his narrator to be a gifted writer Bri in this story had to be an investigator, she is a journalist and her mother is her access to all the history and lore. Pelayo is working with several recurring themes but the houses and the ‘thin places’ around her beloved Chicago operate in her novels like a power cord does in a Ramones song.
“Archer Ave. is an energy center. A thin place. Just like this house…”
I love the concept of a thin place. This novel gives us the feeling that the two characters at the center exist in this thin place. I don’t know if Archer Ave, of if it is a real place but I get the sense now that I am two novels into this author that she likes to start from these real places and history. I could google but I want to preserve that Mystery.
“What's also scary is sometimes when you're trying to wake up from a nightmare, you just can't. You open your eyes and you're just there in your bed, feeling trapped and paralyzed.”
Vanishing Daughters is not exactly an instant nightmare like some novels, but for the reader who connects with Bri we understand her fears. She is a defined character enough; with motivations we can understand. I did have the question marks with her that I did with Anna in CP’s Forgotten Sister. I cared enough about Bri that I cringed internally wondering how she might survive and thrive.
There is some commentary on haunting, grieving, and death that might come off as old hat to some horror readers but again I enjoy those moments when they are well done. A horror story is a part of a long tradition. Moments like this…
“We speak of haunted houses as if they are grim and gruesome things, but what makes a house haunted?
People.
A person dies.
A soul is restless, and I do not know if I believe in souls or spirits or ghosts but what I do believe is that I'm slowly losing parts of myself.”
There are parts of Vanishing Daughters that feel familiar, as a horror novel and thematically like a Cynthia Pelayo novel. This is a feature, not a bug. At the same time, several things make this novel stand alone. I love a novel that is the product of a singular voice. No one else could write this novel. It is not just the setting, the killer that makes it unique my Dickheads will enjoy a slightly Matheson or PKD-inspired sci-fi touch to the afterlife
“He points at me. “brilliant. Exactly. According to the CIA, if the frequency of human consciousness drops from ten to the power of thirty centimeters per second but remains above the state of total rest, it can transcend space-time.”
I think this will pass right by some readers as world-building details but I loved it.
“Think of a radio example. Imagine a human consciousness is a radio playing a certain music station. Well, if you move that dial and start searching for another station and just land on nothing on that fuzzy place we call snow, that is total rest. That is where you transcend space and time.”
“We’re radios, in a way, tune to a song? Sometimes there are people who can connect to the station we're playing, and they linger here with us for a while during this life. Sometimes the song they want to listen to changes, but sometimes they turn off altogether.”
I am looking forward to talking on the podcast with Cina, she told me parts of this novel were inspired by PKD’s UBIK and yeah…
“is it possible to have consciousness that's so expanded, so far-reaching beyond space and time and dreams, that you could communicate not just with the living, but with the dead, or the murderer, and ask them… what happened to you?”
I don’t want to give away the ending but I love the final backstory behind that connects to one of the most infamous of Chicago killers.
“It was Father who told me I could not die. I asked him how he knew this. He said he tried to poison me many times, and not once did the poison affect me because of that father said we believed I wasn't human he said he read about fairies who looked like humans and believed, then, that I was a fairy.”
This is a twist hidden in the open for those of us familiar with the historical events Pelayo ties into the novel.
As great as it is, and it is 200% a recommendation I have only one minor issue. Pelayo appears as committed to writing in the first person as she is setting her novels in Chicago. I have never been shy about expressing my feelings about how limiting the first person can be. Because the narrative switches POV there is no indication in some chapters who is I writing to us. I was confused the first time we switched POV. A few of the chapters I was lost for a page or two until a specific detail told me – this is the killer or Bri. Ultimately, it was a minor issue.
98% of this novel I was delightfully lost in the narrative and most readers probably will not notice. Vanishing Daughters is a fantastic novel that I very much enjoyed. The Midwest setting, the history, The light Sci-fi, and the horror elements were perfect alchemy. Now that I have read two novels, Pelayo officially has a locked in reader.
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