We all experience horror in different ways. I think nightmares can be of one thing but manifest differently for different people. It has the face of a witch and body of an owl in the original folktale, however, I wanted to re-invent who and what La Lechuza is. There are two stories featuring the creature La Lechuza. Are any of the stories in Mestiza Blood connected to any of your novels?Īre there any writers who you see as having a particular big influence on either specific stories in Mestiza Blood or on this collection as a whole, but not on any of your previous work? Mestiza Blood is not your first published book. I would say they are solidly horror and a bit erotic horror. The book wasn’t created until I had a volume of stories to fill a book.Īnd then what genres do these stories fall under?

Before I knew it, I had a collection.Īside from having to fit the theme, what other parameters did the stories in Mestiza Blood have to fit?

Many of these stories I wrote because they formed in my mind from a few personal experiences, and I felt to compelled to write them down with a folkloric and urban legend slant. They fascinated me and I wondered where they came from. I have no real concrete answer for that except I’ve gone my whole life hearing folklore and urban legends.

To start, the cover of Mestiza Blood says it’s “A short story collection of nightmares, dreams, desires & visions of the Chicana experience.” Why did you decide to do an entire collection of these kind of stories as opposed to one with a different theme or no theme at all? But as you’ll learn from the following email interview with Castro, there’s more to this collection than you might expect. Castro’s new short story collection, Mestiza Blood ( hardcover, paperback, Kindle). With the cover declaring it, “A short story collection of nightmares, dreams, desires & visions of the Chicana experience,” you might think you have all the information you need about V.

Mestiza Blood by V. Castro