About this Event
We're delighted to be working with Dead Ink Books to host the Manchester launch of Gerardo Sámano Córdova's genre-bending new literary horror novel MONSTRILIO - a thought-provoking meditation on grief, acceptance, and the monstrous sides of love and loyalty. Gerardo will be in conversation with Xavier Aldana Reyes.
Doors: 6.30, starts: 6.45
Tickets start from £4.00. Monstrilio will also be available to purchase on the night and Gerardo will be signing copies after the talk. If you would like a signed copy but cannot make the event, please contact us on 0161 274 3331 or [email protected] and we can arrange this for you.
About the book:
Grieving mother Magos cuts out a piece of her deceased eleven-year-old son Santiago’s lung. Acting on fierce maternal instinct and the dubious logic of an old folktale, she nurtures the lung until it gains sentience, growing into the carnivorous little Monstrilio she keeps hidden within the walls of her family’s decaying Mexico City estate.
Eventually, Monstrilio begins to resemble the Santiago he once was, but his innate impulses― though curbed by his biological and chosen family’s communal care― threaten to destroy this fragile second chance at life.
A thought-provoking meditation on grief, acceptance, and the monstrous sides of love and loyalty, Gerardo Sámano Córdova blends bold imagination and evocative prose with deep emotional rigor. Told in four acts that span the globe from Mexico to Brooklyn to Berlin, Monstrilio offers, with uncanny clarity, a cathartic and precise portrait of being human.
About the author:
Gerardo Sámano Córdova is a writer and artist from Mexico City, where he currently resides. He holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of Michigan. He has studied with Alexander Chee at Bread Loaf as a work/study scholar, and with Garth Greenwell at Tin House. His work has appeared in Ninth Letter, Passages North, and Chicago Quarterly Review, and is forthcoming in The Common.
Dr Xavier Aldana Reyes is Reader in English Literature and Film at Manchester Metropolitan University and co-president of the International Gothic Association. His books include Contemporary Body Horror (Cambridge University Press, 2024), Gothic Cinema (Routledge, 2020) and, as editor, Horror: A Literary History (British Library Publishing, 2016).
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Blackwell's Bookshop, 146 Oxford Road, Manchester, United Kingdom
GBP 4.00 to GBP 12.00
