The WD Interview: Isabel Cañas

[This interview originally appeared in the September/October 2025 issue of Writer's Digest magazine.]

In the May/June 2022 issue of WD, I featured The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas in our Breaking In column. A haunted house story at its core, Cañas’ debut novel is set in the aftermath of the Mexican War for Independence and tackles issues of feminism, religion, folk magic, and familial secrets. It was my first horror novel for the column, and I was so excited that Cañas wanted to be a part of it—I knew that novel was something special.  

Everyone else knew it too. The Hacienda netted a nomination for a Bram Stoker Award, was a finalist in the Locus Awards, and a nomination for the Goodreads Choice Awards, as well as positive write-ups in The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, and The Washington Post. Her second novel, Vampires of El Norte (a vampire novel set during the Spanish–American War), was a finalist in the Locus Awards, a finalist for the Endeavour Awards, a nomination for the Goodreads Choice Awards, a Booklist starred review, with positive reviews from NPR, Elle, USA Today, HuffPost, and more. 

Now, Cañas is back with her third novel, The Possession of Alba Díaz. Set in 1765, this novel is about a demonic presence in a Mexican silver mine that preys upon a woman who has escaped with her family from a dangerous plague. 

We started our conversation about the changes she’s experienced since we first spoke in 2022. 

I think there are two things. … the personal bit is … I’ve had two children, and I’ve moved from New York City to Seattle to be closer to my husband’s family. So, I’ve had a change of community outside of the home and a change of community, very, very, up close and personal in the home. [Laughs] And so, my priorities as an artist have shifted really seismically. I used to be much more outward-facing in terms of getting anxious about how my words would be received. And now, I am too sleep deprived! 

I have found that there are so many demands on my time and on my emotional availability that I no longer have any energy for what’s going on the internet or what Writer Y is saying about Writer X. I think of social media is like an apartment building that has a lot of doors, and everybody’s opening a door and yelling into the hall and then shutting it. … I was opening my door and leaning into the hall and seeing who was saying what, and hanging out the window on the fire escape, like, Ooh, what’s going on out there? … You would think that having children and being a primary caregiver, it is really difficult to have that proverbial room of one’s own to sit and write. But I have found that they have given me permission to stop listening to anyone else. And I think really good art is coming from that. 

And two, professionally, I have an audience now, which is terrifying, and also wonderful! … My books have found their way into many, many readers’ hands—that means they’re waiting for the next one, and they’re excited about the next one, which is a double-edged sword because I don’t want to disappoint.  

But with this book, I’m actually really excited because I think I have heard my two main groups of readers: The readers who love the romance, and the readers who love the horror. And I’m coming to make them both happy with The Possession of Alba Díaz. When The Hacienda came out, people said, “Oh my God, it was so scary. I loved it. Hot priest. Yes. But there’s no happily ever after!” With Vampires of El Norte, I sought out to write a happily ever after. It’s a historical romance in horror clothing, if you will—extremely dramatic horror clothing. And some people said, “This is a great book, but it’s not scary enough.” And I said, “Bet.” [Laughs] 

I think of my books in terms of the genre clothes they wear as a triangle. There’s romance, there’s horror, and there’s historical. Those are the three points of the triangle. And as a writer, those are very difficult to juggle. They compete for square footage in the word count. They compete thematically; they compete for the character’s attention—and my attention. And with the last two books, I’ve always thought of the three points of the triangle and thought, Eh, yeah. I picked two. … With Alba Díaz, I tried to hit all three.  

It’s like you’re on a Bosu ball, and sometimes you lean forward, you lean to one side, you lean to the other. I think in terms of where I see myself professionally, I lean more toward genre space. I think because of my background as a writer, I came up as a fantasy writer first and foremost. I always loved darker fantasy when I was growing up. Holly Black and her novel Tithe were hugely impactful for me as a baby 14-year-old. And I also loved the Gothic—I loved Dracula. I have vivid memories of reading Dracula for the first time when I was 17. And reading Beloved for the first time, like, I literally have goosebumps just thinking about it. 

So, I think I see myself more as a gothic horror writer, first and foremost. And the history comes from my professional training. I entered my PhD program, which was in Near Eastern languages and civilizations at the University of Chicago; it was a history degree and a language degree. And it was exactly what I wanted to do professionally at the time. But at the same time, I thought to myself, This is perfect story research! 

I struggle to write anything contemporary. I really struggle because the draw of the past is just too romantic for me. 

They’re completely different parts of my brain. … My mom is visiting right now, and I was telling her about this short fiction writer, Amber Sparks. Her short fiction is mostly flash and micro, and it’s glorious, and it just hits you and then you’re out and it’s over. And I have two modes: I have the novel, and I have that. I’d say some of my older short stories fall in between. But right now, in the phase of life and artistry that I’m in, those are my two modes, and they’re two separate parts of my brain. Writing short fiction is a very different discipline, and I absolutely study it and treat it as such. And it’s always been harder for me. 

It is interesting that you notice that there is more of a contemporary setting in my shorter fiction, because I think that happens for two reasons. One, when you’re writing a story that’s going to be between 500–1,200 words long, there’s very little space to set up a secondary world. I’ve tried in some of my short stories, and I don’t think I have really nailed it. You need more space to set up a world that is unfamiliar to your audience. … You have to ask yourself, What is the most important thing the story is telling? And for me, that’s character first. And so other pieces tend to fall away.  

I think some of my stories, like “My Sister Is a Scorpion” or “All the Things I Know About Ghosts, By Ofelia, Age 10” are stories that when I pictured writing them, I didn’t think too much about it because in “All the Things I Know About Ghosts,” when it came to setting, there was a particular part of the setting that’s really important. It’s the fact that the town is underwater. That’s like the primary magical realist conceit, ifyou will. And in “My Sister Is a Scorpion,” I didn’t want the setting to really get in the way too much. There’s a little bit here and there, but the primary focus is the characters. And so for the reader reading short fiction, what they bring to the table is a whole lot of inferences that they make from the text. … Because when time is short, you really gotta cut to the gristle. 

This is why I believe I think of myself as a horror writer, first and foremost, rather than a historical writer, because horror is all about character. Without character, it doesn’t work. If you have a slasher movie with a main character who, you know, they’re pretty two-dimensional, it’s another B-movie, and you’re like, “Oh, that was fun. But what else?” But if you are watching the same slasher movie, but you care profoundly that the character makes it out alive, you think about that movie for years.  

I think of my books in the same way. And it’s like, horror doesn’t work unless you really, really have that beating heart at the center. 

… Obviously, historical fiction cares about character, but I think if you have historical fiction that has really rich setting, the detail is amazing. You have a really big cast, and maybe the main character [doesn’t] quite land perfectly. You can still read that book and think, Five stars! That was amazing. When the reader of historical fiction seeks out historical fiction, there are other things that are looking for than just the character arc. When the horror reader comes to a horror book—and there are different kinds of horror readers, but if you are, let’s say, a general audience reader coming to a horror book, if you take out the character, they’re like, “What the hell am I reading? Like, why do I care?” I care so much about really reaching into people’s chests and giving their heart a squeeze, making them care. 

Supernatural element for sure. You know, you are the first person who asked me that, and this is bringing me so much clarity. Like, yes, I’m first and foremost a horror, especially gothic. Because that’s the thing I think about first.  

With The Hacienda, I wanted to write a haunted house novel. I knew I wanted to set it in the past in Mexico. And I am, by training, a medievalist. So even the 19^th century feels a bit fresh to me. There are so many documents! My PhD work is on the 14^th century, so nobody can complain about 19^th-century documents. This is my decree. So, the idea is that there would be a haunted house. And kind of a riff on Rebecca, because I read Rebecca, and it frustrated me so much. [Laughs] The historical setting came later. I was reading through 19^th-century Mexican history. I knew I wanted the postcolonial period. I knew I wanted Independent Mexico—that is, post-1821. And I knew I wanted a certain kind of isolation that comes from not having modern technology to communicate with people outside of where you are. And slowly, I began to whittle the timeframe down further and further in my training as a historian. 

One question I often ask myself and ask my students is “Can you follow the money?” So, the 1820s, this is a brand new, “fresh” modern nation. There are a lot of ghosts from the colonial past and from the pre-Hispanic past. So, who at the end of this 11-year civil war would have money, and when would they have money? And slowly, that led me to the producers of alcohol. And so that led me to the setting specifically of The Hacienda. So actually, it came much later than the idea for a haunted house, which is the speculative element.  

For Vampires of El Norte, the true cold facts are that I pitched my editor a vampire book, and I was pretty sure I wanted to set it during the Mexican–American War, but when and where precisely came much later.  

And then, with The Possession of Alba Díaz, the demonic element came first. It absolutely came before the setting because I, again, followed the money. I thought about the silver industry in Mexico and where mining was the most predominant in the colonial period. I decided I wanted to set a book in the colonial period for vibes, for a change of scene. [Laughs] It was super interesting, really narrowing down which decade in particular I wanted to focus on because the silver industry had so many peaks and dips, rags to riches. People would have their minds flooded and lose everything. Or people would strike a line of ore and become millionaires overnight. It was that, in that setting, that added to the richness and the themes of Alba Díaz. But I knew from the jump that we were going to do a demonic possession. 

I think it’s more difficult to make creatures scary for the reader. People who work in the horror genre in different media have different tools at their fingertips. You can make a monster movie really scary. However, sometimes when the monster is revealed, it’s not so scary. And that tells you a lot about what’s really making the audience scared.  

When I was 12, I saw the movie Signs, and I was so scared the entire movie, until you see the alien and you’re, then you’re like, “That’s it? OK.” And it ceases to be frightening. So, what’s really making you scared throughout that entire experience is the suspense. It’s the tension that’s really getting you chewing your nails and shoveling popcorn into your mouth.  

When it comes to writing just black words on a white page, you have certain tools at your fingertips, very specific tools. You don’t have jump scares, you don’t have music, you don’t have lighting—you have words. And what that means is my primary tool is playing with the audience’s senses. I think really hard about sense, the sense of smell, the sense of touch over sight and sound, because those can lead you toward that sense of the uncanny. And that is the most powerful tool that I have at my fingertips as a writer. And why I think having a creature feature, as delightful as it was to write, I think the vampires were scarier before you saw them. 

I think what’s been happening the last few years has filled me with such energy and such delight as a reader. Because as a Latina girl—woman now—coming to this genre, I often struggled to see myself in characters, period. I struggled to relate to the fears that the characters were confronted with. As a Latina woman moving through the world and moving through space outside of my home, there are things that make me afraid that don’t make a white man horror writer afraid. 

There are changes happening in this country that are terrifying to me personally that may not impact a lot of other writers who are writing horror. So what I think is injecting horror with this life, with this “renaissance,” if you will, is the fact that it is uplifting voices that have not necessarily been given airtime before. Readers gobble it up because … those books are about what they are afraid of. Publishing being a very unromantic business, they saw Mexican Gothic print money, and my book went on submission like six weeks after å was published. I think there was luck in there for me. But when I looked to the future, that book opened so many doors for writers of color. 

Vampires of El Norte was the most difficult to research because of two major problems. One, there was a wealth of information that inherently makes it difficult for the writer of historical fiction to pare down the truly essential set pieces for the story. Many of us who enjoy historical fiction have picked up a book where we learn about the history of the embroidery floss and where it was farmed and how it was sewn into the dress of the girl who is going off to do the thing. And in the end, you don’t learn anything about the character. The historical detail is too much at the forefront. [Vampires] was a book where there was too much historical detail at the forefront in early drafts and too many characters, which I, on a minor note, slightly resent because I am Mexican, I have many cousins. I was very focused on making the setting of Vampires of El Norte as rich and historically authentic as possible from the Mexican perspective. What that meant was that it was very cluttered. I had to pare away a lot of stuff. I had to distill a lot of detail, and that was very difficult. The reason why I emphasize the Mexican perspective is that the literature available in English is heavily, heavily of the American perspective. The American perspective in the Mexican–American War is not something I was interested in exploring, period. I was interested in exploring the perspective of characters who grew up and who came of age getting strangled between the two. 

So not from the Mexican center, not from the American Imperial center, but from the borderlands. And that meant reading a lot in Spanish, which is something I do. But it takes longer because it’s not my primary driver, if you will. … That is why I wanted to take that angle in my fiction to amplify that voice, because it’s the voice of my ancestors. Literally, the Cañases have lived in South Texas since before Mexico was independent, and my mom is from the Valley in particular. So, highlighting this point of view was extremely important to me as a personal project as well as a piece of art. 

It was very difficult because there was a lot of material to sift through, a lot of biased material to sift through. And the book itself, that triangle we were talking about at the very beginning of our conversation,was very difficult to balance. … And also the historical setting—the Battle of Palo Alto is extremely well documented. To have characters who are fictional wander into these extremely well-documented historical events, you have to be really precise about certain things. 

… So that was the most difficult. Hands down. [Laughs] Was it the most rewarding? Probably. I’m really proud of the work I did. 

Oh, never stop pushing yourself to be better. Better is always possible. Selfishly, from the reader’s perspective, there is nothing that brings me more delight as a reader than to see my favorite authors get better and better with every book. Even if they maintain quality for a couple of books and then get better and better, I’m OK with that. So, push yourself; keep studying.