The weather was gray and rainy, without a hint of Florida sunshine, when Silvia Moreno-Garcia checked into a Marriott hotel near the Orlando airport. She and her fellow attendees at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts were comfortably isolated — the A.C. cranked up to the arctic maximum — but there were visible signs of encroaching nature in the outside world. Lizards occasionally scurried underfoot, and a notice by the lake warned guests not to feed the alligators.
Moreno-Garcia was the guest of honor at the spring meeting, an annual gathering now in its fifth decade, that draws several hundred academics, editors, critics, and “creatives” for discussions of science fiction and fantasy. Every year, clusters of authors and graduate students engage in animated debates by the pool, name tags dangling from their necks.
With its academic orientation, the conference offers a relatively safe space for introverts, which Moreno-Garcia, the author of 11 novels, appreciated: “I’m not a people person, so I’m not naturally inclined to hang out with any human beings at all.” She rarely attends conventions unless she’s invited, admitting that she didn’t know much about this one before the organizers reached out to her.
“I like the fact that they had the academic track,” she said, noting that her own interests tended toward the literary and scholarly side. “I’m probably not the person to have conversations about Marvel movies and things like that. Because I don’t watch them.”
At the hotel, Moreno-Garcia found that people recognized her, “which is a weird sensation — when anybody knows who I am.” Over the last decade, she has emerged as a major writer in the speculative field, eagerly reworking genre conventions — noir, horror, fantasy — for modern readers.
Her latest, “The Bewitching,” which comes out on July 15, cuts between three distinct time periods, as a New England graduate student in 1998 investigates a mysterious disappearance from the thirties and recalls her grandmother’s stories of witchcraft in Mexico. It’s the kind of evocative premise that many novelists would be happy to mine for an entire series of books, but Moreno-Garcia steadfastly refuses to be categorized.
In the new novel, she also ventures into darker territory, exploring themes of incest and vampirism that emerge organically from the isolated settings of Gothic fiction.
“The vampire in ancient folklore is coming back to the family,” she explained. “It’s coming back to the community. It’s destroying its own.”
When you meet Moreno-Garcia, the first thing that you notice are her eyes, which — even behind large glasses — are as observant and expressive as Peter Lorre’s. Over coffee, she’s bracingly intelligent, with a knack for striking turns of phrase. During an interview, she compared the legacy of eugenicist beliefs to the persistence of microplastics in human tissue: “It’s like we have eugenics ideas in our bodies. They’re like a cultural haunting.”
A few minutes later, she said that a lot of popular culture is the equivalent of “sterile Monsanto seeds that don’t germinate,” producing works that never take root in the imagination.
Moreno-Garcia, who was born in Mexico in 1981, attended Endicott College in Massachusetts before eventually relocating to Canada. A vibrant local tradition of folklore and supernatural fiction fed directly into “The Bewitching,” which feels right at home in the region that shaped H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson and Stephen King. In the afterword, she writes, “New England naturally seems to breed horror writers.”
She described Lovecraft, in particular, as an important gateway into the history of fantasy and horror. Moreno-Garcia wrote her master’s thesis on Lovecraft and coedited an anthology of stories by women inspired by his fiction, which exposed her to criticism for engaging with an author justifiably seen as a white supremacist: “Somebody sent me a picture of Hitler, saying that I should be sent to the gas chambers.”
She pushed back against the assumption that her study of Lovecraft implied forgiving his racism, but further stressful interactions prompted her to pull back from social media.
“In person, people are a lot nicer,” Moreno-Garcia said. At events, she’ll receive friendship bracelets, stories about how her work has guided readers through difficult times, and requests for help in finding a publisher, which she gently declines.
Moreno-Garcia is well aware that her example is an inspiring one. Early in her career, she published five novels that were critically acclaimed but only moderately successful, while managing to avoid the industry pressure to concentrate on a single genre or series.
She credited her ability to create a varied body of work to “a lot of bouncing back and forth through the industry,” as well as the freedom granted by low expectations. “Everybody expected me to fail. So I would just say, ‘Well, I’m going to do this now.’ And they’d be like, ‘Sure.’ Pat [my] head and be like, ‘It’s OK.’”
This all changed with the breakout success of “Mexican Gothic,” an atmospheric work of period horror that landed her on the best-seller lists in 2020.
“‘Mexican Gothic’ answered so many questions our culture was asking at that moment — and in a darkly romantic, glamorously attractive genre,” Tricia Narwani, who edited the novel for Del Rey, said in an email.
When it was optioned as a potential series for Hulu, Moreno-Garcia began to get unsolicited messages from strangers — including one man who sent her a shirtless photo — hoping to be cast on the show. It never got off the ground, which she described as a relief: “I was glad when nobody cared about me anymore.”
“The Bewitching” once again returns to the uncanny elements that have been present in her work since her early short stories, with recurrent images like the color yellow — a sign, she said, that “there’s something wrong in the world” — and sinister fungi.
“It’s very humid in my kitchen, so garlic begins to sprout very easily,” Moreno-Garcia said. “It starts to germinate and you think, ‘What’s happening inside my precious perfect home?’ It infiltrates.”
Apart from the alligator warnings, few places might have seemed less uncanny than the Orlando hotel. Moreno-Garcia spent her time at the conference talking to readers and attending academic presentations, although never on her own work.
Yet there were traces of disquiet under the palm trees. Some attendees — particularly those who identified as queer — felt uncomfortable traveling to Florida, and the organization was discussing whether to find a different venue for future conventions.
As a writer navigating the age of Trump and A.I., Moreno-Garcia acknowledged her own sense of uneasiness, feeling as if she had “wandered into the wrong book.”
“It’s definitely a bizarre time,” she added, “and I guess maybe you need bizarre art for bizarre times.”
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