Announcing Cursed Morsels' FIRST Single-Author Short Story Collection

The Big News and an Interview with the Author

Press Release

In August 2024, Cursed Morsels Press will publish Cynthia Gómez’s phenomenal debut short story collection The Nightmare Box and Other Stories. With its queer, anti-capitalist, anti-fascist spirit, this collection is a perfect addition to our catalog, and I’m so grateful to work with Cynthia on this project.

Let’s take a peek at what she has in store for us…

The Nightmare Box and Other Stories is a stunning and unique collection of horror and speculative fiction, and we can’t wait to share it with you. You can read a couple stories from the collection early by visiting Cynthia’s Linktree.

While we still have a while to wait before the release, I wanted to offer Cursed Morsels readers an inside look at Cynthia’s creative processes, inspirations, and personal background. Keep reading for a fascinating interview with the author…

Interview with Cynthia Gómez

Eric Raglin: This collection is undeniably ACABy. How would you describe your unique approach to writing about cops? And how are your stories in conversation with other works of fiction about cops?

Cynthia Gómez: My approach to writing about cops is pretty simple: they’re the source of tremendous violence in the lives of my characters, because they’re the source of tremendous violence in the real world. When Roberto, my protagonist in “Huitzol and the Rope of Thorns,” gets pulled over by the cops, he is in fear for his life from the second that stop begins. Even though he’s done everything he’s supposed to: he’s not speeding, his license is in order, he even went to a “Know Your Rights” training to prepare him for this moment. And yet he knows that these cops could murder him with impunity, because, in real life, that’s what they do.

When I was in college and for a few years after, I organized against police brutality, and I met and marched with people who’d lost a loved one to the cops and had spent years fighting for justice. Some of these were parents who had lost children, and who had to know that the killer of their child would never get punished, and might even kill again. It was incredibly meaningful to me to be able to revisit that experience, this time bringing in a mischievous and powerful god called Huitzol, so I could explore the possibility of tipping the power balance back in the right direction.

The word “copaganda” exists for a reason, and copaganda is everywhere. The most obvious are shows like Law & Order or CSI, which, not coincidentally, started sprouting and mushrooming in the ‘90s, just when the U.S. began its mass incarceration bonanza against Black and brown people. It paints this incredibly distorted picture of the cops and their real role. I really hope to see a whole flowering of work that starts from reality, and that deals with the reality of the violence and destruction that cops are responsible for, and that use the creativity of speculative fiction to bring those stories to life.

Oakland, California—your home for over twenty years—is a central source of inspiration for this collection. For readers who don’t know much about Oakland, what makes the city’s history especially fascinating? And why do you often use the horror genre to explore the city’s past and present?

I could talk about Oakland forever. It’s given the country and the world so many essential things. It was one of the main destinations for the Great Migration during World War II. And it was the children of Great Migration, kids born in the ‘40s, who founded the Black Panthers in 1967. Student strikes in San Francisco and Berkeley (neighboring cities, and very much part of the same ecosystem) established Ethnic Studies and Black studies in 1968 and 1969. By the ‘80s and ‘90s, the East Bay had one of the highest concentrations of gays and lesbians in the U.S, and the highest concentration of working artists outside of New York. The San Antonio neighborhood of Oakland, in the same time period, had more foreign languages spoken than anywhere else in the country.

So for decades, Oakland was kind of this briar patch: all the money and the resources went to wealthier cities, the working-class jobs were disappearing, and in that briar patch, all kinds of radical and queer traditions developed and thrived. Musicians and artists like Sylvester, Santana (who sadly seems to be confused about whether trans people are people), Too $hort, E-40, Boots Riley, Tupac and Digital Underground: all of these folks are Bay Area creations or heavily influenced by the culture of the Bay and Oakland in particular.

So it’s really special for me to be able to write these stories and spend time with these places that mean so much to me, and to bring these histories onto the page. “The Nightmare Box” was my chance to explore the true story of COINTELPRO, which was a secret FBI project that used any means necessary – including murder – to destroy radical political organizations like the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement. “A Kiss to Build a Dream On” was a way to not just bring queer history to life, but also to take on the history of police brutality against queers and bring in some much-needed resistance. Again, with magic, but in the hands of the good guys.

Many stories in this collection focus on magic. Where does your interest in magic—as a personal/cultural practice and a narrative force—come from?

I don’t have a personal practice with magic; for me it’s really just an evergreen fascination, since I was a little kid. I love magic and the supernatural because it’s so much fun. What if dragons? What if ghosts and curses and spells? It’s like a playground for our imagination, where the literal and the metaphorical blend right into and out of each other.

There’s another reason I use magic in my stories so much. Take police brutality. Any solution you can think of – civilian review boards, better training, rules about use of force, body cameras, anything – and people have tried it for decades, all over the country, and it fails. The cops make sure it does. The Watts Rebellion was partly a rebellion against police violence, and that was nearly 60 fucking years ago. So, if I want something powerful enough to stop a cop before he beats the shit out of someone … I have to imagine something that doesn’t even exist in our world. Or in “Lips Like Sugar,” Vivi is a vampire who can “walk into a room full of strange drunk men, knowing that she is nobody’s prey.” When has that ever been true for a woman, or a queer or gender nonconforming person? I had to give her magical superpowers to make her safe in a room of drunk men.

This collection often focuses on the world of work and how labor conditions transform us. How are some of your own work experiences reflected in these stories?

“Lips Like Sugar,” funnily enough, came about because at my job (I work for a labor union) I had to work on a database that calculates job seniority for our members, and I made a mistake that gave some of them several hundred years’ worth of seniority. I joked about how, as far as I knew, our union didn’t represent any vampires, but that got me wondering: what would a vampire union agitate for? And, while I was at it, why were vampire stories always, always about wealthy vampires? What would a working-class vampire’s life be like?

There are also characters like the narrators of “The Weight of It” and “Hot and Cold,” that have a work history a lot like mine when I was younger. Bouncing around from job to job because they can’t make anything fit; filling in the gaps with badly-paid freelance work; feeling exhausted from having to start over, yet again. Thankfully that’s not my experience any more, but it’s increasingly the experience for millions of people, because the concept of stability at work is a foreign thing to most of us.

I know you enjoy doing research for your stories. What was the most interesting research you did while writing this collection?

I think my single favorite topic was digging up the queer history of the Bay Area. There’s this great book called Wide Open Town, about public queer life, like bars and clubs, from the ‘40s to just before Stonewall. It tells the story of all these repressive laws and violent police raids, yes, but also about resistance – it took a Supreme Court case to determine that, no, the cops couldn’t legally raid a bar just because there were gay people in it – and about people like José Sarria, the first publicly gay person to run for public office in California (he didn’t win), more than a decade before Harvey Milk won his election in 1978.

I’m working on another project now, that I don’t want to mention too much about for fear I’ll jinx it, but it’s historical and very queer and set in the same universe as some of the stories in this collection, so I’m drawing on a lot of that same research.

What are your strongest inspirations for this collection? These inspirations could be literary, aesthetic, political, historical, etc.

Stephen King is easily the top inspiration; I started reading his stuff when I was eleven. “Will They Disappear” owes a tremendous debt to Carrie and Firestarter, and “The Nightmare Box” owes a big debt to the concept of The Shop, which appears in a bunch of his earlier work. “The Road out of Nowhere” is heavily inspired by all The Twilight Zone episodes I watched as a kid; “Someone Else’s to Destroy” owes a whole lot to the questions posed in Tuck Everlasting and Beloved; and “The Teachers’ Association” was an homage to Ira Levin. “Lips Like Sugar” took from Fledgling and the new Interview With the Vampire series and Let the Right One In.

And this collection, as well as pretty much my writing career, wouldn’t exist without Carmen Maria Machado and Victor LaValle. Those two writers not only brought me into that metaphorical playground but also helped me to see that there’s a place for people like me in speculative fiction.

What type of reader will most enjoy The Nightmare Box and Other Stories?

This is the hardest question to answer! I think that you’ll enjoy these stories if you ever read or watched Carrie or Jessica Jones and you daydreamed about what you’d do if you had that power. If you like the idea of oppressive people – cops, landlords, abusers, sexual harassers – getting their magical comeuppance. Some of the stories do get very dark – “Will They Disappear” is one of the darkest things I’ve ever written – but there’s a lot of catharsis and a lot of assholes getting hoisted on their own petard. And don’t worry; there are a few stories about horrible loneliness and grief, and where things don’t always end well.