Cynthia Pelayo Weaves A Chilling Dreamscape in Vanishing Daughters

There is an intense, textural quality to Cynthia Pelayo’s prose, something that has developed over the course of her career and which blends poetry, true crime, fairy tales, and pure emotional perceptiveness. Her latest novel, Vanishing Daughters, feels like the apex of this style of writing, a book so rich with evocative detail that you’ll get lost in individual sentences even as you’re swept along by its gripping narrative.

Briar Rose Thorne has been struggling ever since her mother passed away, leaving her the family’s decaying Chicago mansion and a load of memories that her daughter just can’t shake. Though her best friend Emily and her dog Prairie are in the house to keep her company, Briar’s time is mostly occupied by the house’s ghosts, who manifest their presence in everything from her recurring insomnia to the many vintage radios lining the shelves. 

Haunted though she is, Briar tries to push forward with work, to bury herself in freelance journalism and hope that research can quell the lost feeling that eats at her. But Briar’s life is consumed, not just by the sense that the ghosts of her family are trying to tell her something, but by the feeling that an active serial killer stalking Chicago’s streets might be not just aware of her, but tied to secrets as old as the city itself, mysteries she’ll have to unlock if she’s ever going to find peace again. 

Through Briar’s own, constantly searching voice, Pelayo makes Vanishing Daughters a compelling vehicle for a variety of cultural obsessions, from true crime to Chicago legends to haunted houses and, of course, fairy tales. As Briar’s name suggests, there is a lot of Sleeping Beauty in its many forms laced through this novel in everything from an unsettling encounter with a spinning wheel spindle to a killer who refers to his victims as “Beauties,” but Pelayo never leans fully on a retelling of the tale we all know. Rather, Vanishing Daughters is much more interested in the thematic scaffolding provided by a story like Sleeping Beauty, what it means for the women at the core of such stories, and what those women must do to wake up and reclaim their own power in a world that seeks to rob them of the same. 

Pelayo’s focus on this kind of thematic exploration, and her ability to weave it through the haunted, strange history of her fantastical vision of Chicago, makes Vanishing Daughters an exceptionally rich read whether you’re coming to it for haunted houses or for true crime connections. She’s an author who’s at home in any of the several subgenres this book is splayed across, but what makes the novel special is Pelayo’s ability to go further than simply mashing these elements together.

There’s a certain daring in Vanishing Daughters, and it begins with the book’s opening pages, when for a moment not even the core characters are certain exactly what’s happening and why. Much of Briar’s sleep-deprived life is occupied with signs and portents, ghosts and grief, dreams and despair, and that means we as readers are following a character who’s often operating from a sense of sheer instinctual need to move forward, to claw for meaning in a world that’s grown harsher for her. It’s a difficult place to put a character, and the level of difficulty increases when that character is forced to question the nature of her reality, but in Pelayo’s hands, we are never lost. There is an unfailing sense of purpose, poise, and profundity in her work as she shepherds Briar through the darkness, a feeling that she knows exactly where she’s taking us even when we’re not so sure ourselves, and it keeps the pages turning. It also keeps us searching, sifting through every sentence not just for clues, but for the beauty lurking in even the darkest moments of the book. It’s an approach that might not satisfy every single reader, but for those willing to trust in Pelayo’s vision and ambition, it pays off wonderfully. 

Pelayo has been one of the brightest rising stars in genre fiction for quite a while now, but with Vanishing Daughters, it feels safe to drop the “rising.” She is a star of horror, of suspense, of pure fantastical journeys with deeply human cores, and this book is both a delight for longtime fans and the perfect place for new readers to encounter this author’s singular fiction. 

Vanishing Daughters is available now wherever books are sold. 

Matthew Jackson is a pop culture writer and nerd-for-hire who’s been writing about entertainment for more than a decade. His writing about movies, TV, comics, and more regularly appears at SYFY WIRE, Looper, Mental Floss, Decider, BookPage, and other outlets. He lives in Austin, Texas, and when he’s not writing he’s usually counting the days until Christmas.