This is Gerardo Sámano Córdova.

Novels

Monstrilio
2024 Balcones Fiction Prize
Finalist VCU Cabell First Novelist Award
An NPR Books We Love 2023
An Elle Our Favorite Books of 2023
A Goodreads Choice Award nominee for Best Horror and Best Debut Novel
A Barnes & Noble Best Books of 2023
A Book Riot Best Books of 2023
A Shondaland Best Debut Novel of 2023
A The Observer Best Books of 2023
A Huffpost Best Books We Read in 2023
A Powell's Best Books of Horror 2023

After her son dies, Magos carves out a small piece of his 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 decaying childhood home in Mexico City. But despite her best efforts to turn the monster into a man, Monstrilio's innate impulses threaten to destroy this fragile second chance at life.
A meditation on grief, acceptance, and the monstrous sides of love and loyalty, Gerardo Sámano Córdova's ambitious debut spans the globe from Brooklyn to Berlin, offering an uncanny and precise portrait of being human.
“At once heartbreaking and unapologetically strange, this is a cross-cultural, syncretic, folksy, razor-sharp narrative about the horrors of grief and the eternal debate over nature versus nurture. . . . It is at once dark and tender, at times bleak, but balanced with humor that borders on slapstick . . . an outstanding debut; for all the ground being broken in genre-bending horror, his is a distinctive, exciting new voice in fiction.”—Gabino Iglesias, Los Angeles Times
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Short Stories

• "A Self-Appointed Safekeeper of Beauty" in American Short Fiction, 2025
• "Tooth Teeth Tooth" in Elastic Magazine, 2025
• "The Smiling Man" in The Columbia Review, 2025
• "Jeremy" in Barrelhouse, 2024
• "Motel" in Apartamento Magazine, 2023
• "The Tremendous One" in Catapult, 2023
• "Iceberg, Mine" in The Common, 2022
• "Forgotten" / "City" / "Church" in Passages North, 2022
• "Fluffschatten" in Ninth Letter, 2021
• "Boss" in Passages North, 2021
• "Pencil Werewolf" in Chicago Quarterly Review, 2019

Articles & Miscellanea

• "On Dia de Muertos, the Dead Return To Eat Us" in Simply Recipes, 2023
• "HORROR DOES A BODY GOOD, OR, THE STORY OF MY TEETH" in CrimeReads, 2023
• "Review: How to Order the Universe by Maria Jose Ferrada" in The Common, 2022

Short Films

• A Tale Told by a Fool, 2013