This is Gerardo Sámano Córdova.

Novels

Imps!
From the critically acclaimed author of the cult-classic Monstrilio comes a fever dream novel of twins and trickery, broken bones and brokenness, and of monsters, mischief, and mayhem!
On a quiet morning, Francisca awakes to a rare good day. She skips work, admires the squabbling sparrows on her tiny terrace in Mexico City, and senses a joy so refreshing it feels dangerous. But when there’s a knock on her door, announcing an odd stranger at her apartment, Francisca, frightened and fascinated, acts on a whim, shattering her peaceful day and predictable life. She can think of only one person to help her with this unexpected, maybe hostile visitor—her estranged twin brother, Pablo.
As Pablo arrives, the day spirals from an awkward reunion into a claustrophobic, feverish confrontation where the thirty-five-year-old twins must reckon with a past they thought they had outrun. Over the course of this peculiar day, Francisca and Pablo realize this man brings devastating questions and a reckoning twenty years in the making.
Critically acclaimed author of the bestselling cult-classic horror novel Monstrilio, Gerardo Sámano Córdova brings his trademark blend of strangeness, darkness, humor, and tenderness to Imps!, an exploration of imagination, loss, brokenness, and the quest for the extraordinary in everyday life.
“No one captures the intricacies of the human mind and all of its gorgeous pathologies like Gerardo Sámano Córdova . . . [A] pot boiling exploration at the nexus of wickedly perverse and tenderly discomfiting, Imps! is a full-blown original, just like its writer.”—Alejandro Varela, author of The Town of Babylon and Middle Spoon
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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 The Guardian Best Recent
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