What a scream! Anthology brings together 'Latino Horror Stories'

How are you getting ready for Halloween? Buying costumes for your kids — or for yourself — before going trick-or-treating on Oct. 31?

If you’re doing neither, and you want to put yourself in the spirit of Halloween, try this: Read “A Night of Screams: Latino Horror Stories,” edited by Richard Z. Santos.

That should do the trick, so to speak.

Don’t be scared off by the word “screams” in the title or the “horror” in the subtitle.

Some stories have emotionally-manageable moments of ghostly fright, while others are simply unsettling and could give you the heebie-jeebies.

Santos sets the anthology’s dark tone by placing Monique Quintana’s “Dark Lord of the Rainbow” as the opening story. It’s all of two pages.

The very short story has a grandmother telling her 9-year-old granddaughter a tale about a teenage girl who meets a “beautiful man” at the Rainbow Ballroom. She goes with him on a moonlit drive.

Uh-oh, trouble ahead. She looks down and sees hooves where his feet should be. And no one sees the girl again.

The grandmother advises that the girl should have stayed at the ballroom with her friends.

The tale is retold by the 9-year-old’s cousin. In the retelling, the girl dances all night with the man, but finds her way home “with the rain in her hair and blisters on her feet, and tequila in her mouth …”

Santos said in a phone interview that he thinks of the tale as either an urban legend or a family story.

In her contributor’s note at the back of the book, Quintana, the author, writes that the real Rainbow Ballroom in her hometown of Fresno, California, has been a popular dance venue “for young brown people” and it is where her parents first met.

“I use the folk image of an animalistic figure preying on young women, a narrative prevalent in Texas where my grandmothers are from, to explore a young girl’s fascination with storytelling and the darker aspects of desire …” Quintana writes.

The fabled chupacabra is a shadowy figure that emerges in two stories.

One is “A Boy Called Chupa” by V. Castro. The boy’s given name is Julio; his family nickname is Chupa. He has to take special medicine that only his father and uncles may give him; maybe because they’re chupacabras as well.

If he doesn’t take the medicine, well, bad things can happen, as the reader soon sees. The body of a man is found with deadly slashes to his face. Is Julio to blame?

A chupacabra is also referenced at the end of “A Curious Encounter,” a captivatingly told story by mónica teresa ortiz.

In it, a farm hand named Chico declines to go to church with his wife Fey on one Sunday morning. Instead, he wants to check on the herd of Hereford cattle on the ranch where he works in the Texas Panhandle.

He spots a dead cow at the edge of the barbed wire along the property line. Approaching the cow, ortiz writes, “He could just make out two tiny puncture wounds near its belly ... Chico could not see any traces of blood …”

There was no break in the fence line. His blue heeler barked, then growled. About 20 feet away from where he and his cattle dog stood, a shadow leaped over the fence into the brush and prairie grass, too high for Chico to accurately fire at with his rifle.

Later, at home, Chico tells his wife about the strange occurrence. Chico decides it was “Un enano colmilludo. Negro y ojos rojos.” (Translation — “A dwarf with fangs. Black with red eyes.”)

Fey dismisses his conclusion, gives her husband a peck on the cheek, and thinks to herself it was really a chupacabra.

An extended, informative footnote is tacked on to “A Curious Encounter” about the origins and apparent sightings of chupacabras through the Southwest, mostly on the borderlands.

A shadowy figure in the collection familiar to many New Mexicans is in Flor Salcedo’s “La Llorona Happenings.”

A long story in the collection is “Chola Salvation.” It’s actually from Estella Gonzalez’s full-length novel of the same name that was favorably reviewed in 2022. The lively story/novel fuses the real with the supernatural from the get-go: “I’m just kicking back, drinking my dad’s Schlitz when Frida Kahlo and the Virgen de Guadalupe walk into our restaurant. ”

In all, there are 17 stories and four poems in the anthology, which is worth reading any time of the year.

A word about the anthology’s contributors’ notes — the background in the notes enhances the reader’s understanding of the stories. The same goes for Santos’ introduction. It helps the reader’s knowledge of the wider cultural and historical contexts of these Latino horror stories.

In his editor’s note, Santos extends a warm “thank you for being the kind of person who reads every intro, author’s note, bio and more. We need more people like you out there.”