The horror author speaks with PEOPLE about returning to her writing roots with her latest novel
Credit: Kilian Blum; Dutton Books for Young Readers
NEED TO KNOW
- Horror writer Isabel Cañas makes her young adult debut with her new novel The House of Gardenias
- The author speaks with PEOPLE about political fiction, representation in YA lit and why her latest book is her most personal yet
- “I hope that readers walk away from this book with a belief that they too are not as powerless as they think they once were,” Cañas says
Growing up in a haunted house was a fitting start for horror writer Isabel Cañas. As a kid, her family moved frequently, and she was never in one place for more than four years. But a period of the author’s “rambunctious” youth was spent in the suburbs of Chicago, in a house built in the 1920s.
“My dad would give us timeouts when we acted out, which I did a lot,” the author tells PEOPLE. “But the location of the timeout was at the bottom of the stairs in the basement. Whenever I misbehaved, I had to go to the bottom of the basement stairs and sit there in the dark because the light was up very far away.”
“I always felt like something was watching me,” the author continues. “My aunt told me, as an adult, that one time she was staying with us and she saw an apparition of a woman in that house. She was waking up one morning and she felt someone bending over her and she thought it was my mom… and then she vanished … I feel validated because there was something up in that house. There were corners of that house I simply did not like.”
So perhaps her origins make it no surprise that home has become a recurring motif in Cañas’ work. It’s the core of her 2022 debut novel The Hacienda, a historical supernatural story set on a mysterious country estate after the Mexican War of Independence. The uncanny filtered into author’s other books, 2023’s Vampires of El Norte and 2025’s The Possession of Alba Díaz.
Credit: Berkley
“There’s nothing more Goth than being Mexican,” the author says. Roughly quoting Octavio Paz, the author says, “‘Death is a Mexican’s best friend. We walk hand in hand. We have rapport with one another.’ I think that’s something that ended up influencing my fiction in a way I didn’t anticipate.”
Now, Cañas is making her young adult debut with The House of Gardenias, out Sept. 29 from Dutton Books for Young Readers. Set amid a war in a fictional Latin American country, the book centers on Minerva, a 16-year-old runaway who lands a job as a maid to a wealthy widow. The woman’s house holds dark secrets — and its inhabitants may not all be completely alive.
Throughout the writing process, Cañas turned to books about Latin Americans experiencing political regime changes, like Isabel Allende’s celebrated 1982 debut The House of the Spirits and her 1994 memoir, Paula. And while they share similarities, Cañas considers her new novel to be more on the speculative side.
“I don’t think many other genres have tools like that to personify what are often very amorphous, large concepts that are nonetheless extremely important, like collective trauma, colonization, genocide,” she says. “These are things that fiction is the best avenue to grapple with in many ways. But genre fiction, specifically horror, is maybe the best genre with which to grapple with these concepts.”
The House of Gardenias proved to be the author’s most personal book yet. Cañas pulled from her own experience as a doctoral student, when she studied abroad in Turkey in 2016 and witnessed an attempted coup in the middle of the night. She finished the book in 2024 during her own tumultuous period, between the birth of her children and the loss of her grandparents. Cañas’ editor actually suggested that she go darker with her premise and “make it more ruthless.”
Credit: Dutton Books for Young Readers
“One thing that was difficult with this book is that it looks death in the face,” she says. “It grapples with questions of the afterlife and the here and now in ways that my other books hadn’t yet. When I was writing it, it was a really raw time for me to be dealing with those subjects.”
But The House of Gardenias also brought Cañas back to her young adult roots. While she was always drawn to gothic literature, like the works of Edgar Allan Poe, the author got her start writing for young readers. She intended to debut in that genre, but had two YA fantasy novels die on submission before The Hacienda was published.
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“I love The Hacienda and I love what it turned into, but I really was hung up on the idea of succeeding in the young adult space because that’s where I started,” she says. “That was where I cut my teeth as a reader, as a writer.” Some of her favorite books included YA fantasy staples, like Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows series, but also novels like The Wrath & the Dawn by Renée Ahdieh and A Crown of Wishes by Roshani Chokhi.
“For the first time, I was reading fantasy fiction that wasn’t about white girls fighting dragons or whatever, which are delightful books in and of themselves, but they weren’t written for me,” Cañas says. “For once, I was reading books that were written for people like me and it broke my brain in the best of all possible ways.”
Now, as a parent, seeing the diverse array of books available to today’s kids is even more important for Cañas. It’s one of the more promising signs of the young adult genre, she notes.
Credit: Kilian Blum
“I cannot even begin to express how my daughter’s face lights up when she reads books that resonate with her. It’s so special and so important. It just makes kids want to read,” the author says.
“One of the cool things about young adult [fiction] right now is that there are no rules. There are no big trends. There’s no big cash moneymaker trend machine that’s churning away in the background,” she continues. “I would love to see more Latino writers delving into horror and the Gothic in the young adult space in particular. They’re doing some fun stuff in adult horror. But young adult, I’m like, ‘Come to the dark side, guys. We get bloody and ruthless over here, maybe even more so than the adult side.’’
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Though that’s true for The House of Gardenias, Cañas has another intention with the book, and the new audience that comes with it.
“I hope that readers walk away from this book with a belief that they too are not as powerless as they think they once were,” she says. “There’s an importance, a weight to this book going out into the world that I didn’t expect to feel. And I think it’s going to be really special.”
The House of Gardenias is now available, wherever books are sold.
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