M. Olivas is an alumna of the 2022 Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop and the 2023 Under the Volcano Writers Residency. She received her bachelor’s degree in creative writing from the University of California Riverside and once worked as an associate editor for Escape Pod magazine. Her short fiction has appeared in several publications, including Uncanny Magazine, Weird Horror Magazine, Apex, and Bourbon Penn. Her short story “If There May Be Ghosts” was on Reactor magazine’s Must-Read Speculative Short Fiction list for July 2022, and her short story “The Prince of Oakland” was featured in Tenebrous Press’ Brave New Weird anthology for 2024. Olivas also made the longlist for the 2021 Samuel R. Delany Fellowship and was a recipient of the 2022 George R. R. Martin Sense of Wonder Scholarship. As a trans, first-generation Chicana horror writer, Olivas explores the intersection of queer and diasporic experiences in her fiction. She currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area, earning her MFA in creative writing at San Jose State University and collecting transforming robots. “¡Sangronas! Un Lista de Terror” is her second appearance in Uncanny, a powerful exploration of community, essentialism, and pushing back against the rules.
Uncanny Magazine: This is a dark and gritty story of trauma and oppression, of banding together and forming connections, some more tenuous than others. What was your starting point or inspiration for the story? What did you know when you started and what did you discover as you were writing?
M. Olivas: Hehehe, I got the initial idea during a summer night when I was absolutely stoned out of my mind with my bestie at his apartment listening to Orville Peck. I remember it so perfectly, because he’d called me a sangrona—I forget why—and I was so taken by it because I hadn’t heard the term before. My family’s from a ranching pueblo in Michoacán and his from the northern states of Mexico, and he’d said it was a common slang term up there that meant about the same as calling someone a “leech” or “moocher.” And in that moment, my mind had used the last of my two functioning brain cells to clear the weed-fog and gave me this: Sangronas—Chicana vampire punk teens. Like actually, that’s what I jotted down in my notes app. The previous fall, the Criterion Channel had a seasonal film collection about high school horror, and I’d seen Andrew Fleming’s The Craft for the first time. Sacrilegious for a wanna-be-goth like me, I’m sure. But I think that had been rattling around me for a while too.
The months that passed after that night, I kept thinking “Sangrona” as a term for a vampire story and spent a lot of time drawing characters in my story idea notebook. I do a lot of early drafts in it, as well as poetry, random ideas, exercises—but above all, I draw the images that come to me for my story ideas. I consider this part of the “pre-production” process, much like a film with its concept art, before I get to the production side of making the film’s raw material: the prose story. So I’d drawn my four sangronas, many of them in sapphic scenes, to a playlist I’d made for the story, which was essentially just all my moody shit and anything that reminded me of the song “Glass Vase Cello Case” by Tattle Tale because Why Isn’t It On Spotify??? There was a lot of Chelsea Wolfe, Phoebe Bridgers, Big Thief, John Carpenter, and Orville Peck. Essentially, I am a vibes person first. I figure out my esthetic that calls to me with each story during this process. The thing I just couldn’t figure out was the narrative to this story, what I even wanted to have happen within the pages, in regard to a plot. It really barricaded me from writing more than a page or so at any given moment. I kept trying and retrying to approach this story, eventually deciding that for once, I wouldn’t have something so pertinent on an escalating plot, but a story that would be more aimless and vibes first. That helped give me the sandbox to play in, what would become the emotional core of “Sangronas” came from me finally interrogating my own transness.
Around the time I started writing on “Sangronas” was the same time I’d finally been prescribed my HRT. After about a year of therapy, psychiatric appointments, blood tests, among other things, I’d finally been allowed, through my health insurance, to start taking estrogen. I’d known I was trans for a while before that; I think I started my social transition around 2021, though I was very much still in the closet with my family. I was out to my friends and colleagues in my writing community, but I’d wipe the make-up off, pull all of my spilled-out parts back into the closet as soon as I got home. Finally holding my little HRT bottles meant, to me, that I finally needed to take that last step into fully stepping out of the closet and into my true identity.
Only, I didn’t take my HRT. I held onto the bottle for months, just thinking each morning if today would be the day to start it. I had a lot of internalized shame and transphobia in who I was, and for a long time I’d been avoiding unpacking that, dredging and holding before me those ugly feelings I reserved for only myself. I felt like I wasn’t being “trans” enough, nor would I be “woman” enough—a thing I think a lot of brown women like myself think about in general, given our lack of European features. I’d been spending a lot of time really digging into the concept of gender essentialism, examining those particularity vile parts of the intersections as a way to find out how to uproot it from within myself. I ended up seeing a lot of commonalities with gender essentialism, to specially trans essentialism, and even types of racial essentialism. All my life I had to navigate the discourse of “not being Mexican enough.” Or what made someone a “real” Mexican: fluency in Spanish, cultural knowledge, favorite foods—as if not knowing Spanish suddenly threw you into a different ethnic group. I’d already been dealing with that type of gatekeeping all my life, and once I made those connections to other essentialist fallacies, it was easy to use the tools I already had to dismantle them.
The dismantlement took the form of “Sangronas.” I use my art to work out feelings within myself, and to explore things that I personally am drawn to; that’s where the healing lies with my process. So “Sangronas” really ended up being an exorcism of my own shame in being trans. That’s why the story takes the form of a list, I wanted to show the fallacy of it. Its nuances—how having rules can protect you, find community, help discover yourself—and how its rigidity crumbles at the slightest provocation—who enforces the rules and why, who’s barred out, how no one can ever truly follow each rule. I wanted the list to be so overbearing and present that it became arbitrary. By the end, no one’s even following those rules; their Sangrona essentialism leads to their undoing.
We’re all surrounded by the ways we are told we should be, how women should act, how Mexicans should be, what types of queerness are valid—it’s all bullshit! And in framing the narrative into such a rigid sense of rules, I hope what my audience takes from “Sangronas” is the desire to step out of these confines, to unashamedly spread your wings and fly.
Uncanny Magazine: “¡Sangronas! Un Lista de Terror” is full of descriptive details that give the story an immersive and almost cinematic feel. Do you visualize stories (either as a writer or as a reader)?
M. Olivas: Nah, not at all.
LOL! What EVER gave away that I’m a visual storyteller??? Haha, it’s true though. Like I stated, all my stories start off as drawings in my notebooks trying to capture an emotion or vibe, and growing up I’d wanted to make movies. I’m dyslexic. I didn’t read many books as a child, or even as a teenager; books are too long, and my ADHD brain made it so that literature was a difficult medium for me to really get into. The media I did escape into, quite obsessively, were film and comic books—visual media. I spent so many years of my life going to Blockbuster or the library to watch Godzilla films and other monster movies. If I couldn’t find them there, you know, yo ho, a pirate’s life for me.
BUT anyway, movies were my primary form of escapism. And maybe it was because I was young, and my mother was too busy raising three kids and helping my father who’d been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, to even consider supervising the media I was exposed to. But AMC’s thirty nights of horror is a trip when you’re eight. Narrative, pacing, structure, all of that I learned from film, and I was always drawn to movies with distinct tones and atmosphere—probably why horror stuck out of all the genres—and the older I got, the more my tastes evolved. I started exploring more world cinema in high school and college, and even though I realized that I can better express myself through the craft of writing than that of filmmaking, I still have my love for the medium, and always try to take what I learned from filmmaking, the tools to convey emotion visually, and apply that to prose. I have a huge joy in figuring out what are the written equivalences of a Spielberg oner, or match cuts, or montage, or color theory and composition—all of it I use to make a distinct and cinematic voice for my work. And I believe one of the pitfalls in attempting to write cinematically is just going heavy with descriptions, but that’s only one aspect of a film. A film breathes to life with its editing—its compression of time and space—and prose has its own medium-specific tools to do that. Tools like sensory details that elicit the five senses, non-linearity, diction, stream of consciousness, and interiority. It’s the specific weaving of those aspects that creates the distinct patterns that make up a writer’s voice, and I try to weave mine into composing compelling key frames.
When it came to “Sangronas,” around the same time, I was still thinking what a possible narrative could be, how to string together the storyboards I’d sketched out. I’d watched the film Paris, Texas for the first time. Paris, Texas being a film directed by Wim Wenders that follows an amnesiac Harry Dean Stanton trying to reconnect with his child and search for his wife after spending years wandering alone in the desert in a fugue state. The cinematic techniques in that film became hugely influential for my film—sorry I mean short, prose story. And if you haven’t seen it, go watch it, it’s fucking brilliant; the entire movie takes place throughout the American Southwest, and its visual language is all just pure, distilled Americana, farmed in a way that came off as just so, so gothic to me.
I’d written gothic westerns before—my debut novel, Sundown in San Ojuela is a gothic spaghetti western where a lot of the style and inspiration came from Sergio Leone’s filmmaking techniques, who’d pioneered the genre of spaghetti western. But Paris, Texas was gothic in its decay, its almost satirical display of what once was the height of capitalist, consumerist, excessiveness that was American culture in the mid-twentieth century. Now even. From its long, uninterrupted shots of American landscapes to its mega-highway overpasses, sun-bleached diners, empty properties wasting away, abandoned strip malls, worn-down infrastructures, and massive brutalist parking garages—that was decayed, sun-bleached style of the American West style that I adore, that I’d grown up around, and it was that style that I chose would become the visual language for “Sangronas.”
Uncanny Magazine: You’ve written both short stories and (forthcoming later this year) a novel—what elements of your writing are consistent across both forms, and what differences emerged?
M. Olivas: That’s a great question! I really spend a lot of time thinking about whether each of my projects is going to be a long or short piece. I know some authors don’t approach it like that. Many just write and let the story take the shape that it takes, but I’m far more rigid. I need a level of rigidity to pair with my exploration to find a structure that works for me, and I’d found that I have different ideas that distinguish short stories and novels as different mediums. I see short stories as setups and punchlines, whereas a novel is a whole stand-up special with multiple points of tension and release, all while ramping up to the final showstopper moment. I’m trying not to make each of these answers a micro essay (I’m known to yap), but I’d say the medium is just the lens to explore whatever concept I’m interested in.
I’ve been told I have a distinct voice, and again, given my process, they all are very visual-heavy and cinematic in nature. I find that I write in second person a lot, and while that’s tedious for some cowards readers, it comes very naturally to me to read and write, probably because I think in second person (years of total dissociation will do that to ya), and the experiences of having that distance, that type of command of one’s own body, is very common among queer people.
Most of my work explores the body, too. It’s something I’ve always been fascinated by how we’re put together and how we come apart, figuratively and literally. Horror lends itself so perfectly to that, and so my work is consistently dark, with a focus on brown and queer bodies. I’m always going to write about queerness, about Latinidad. Beyond horror, I consider myself a Chicanafuturist, because I think it’s so important to have narratives that place queer Chicanas in the center of the fantastic. There aren’t too many of us writing in this particular niche, though there are more now than when I was a child, but the diversity in what is considered the Latina experience is so exciting. There’s no one true experience—no single, essential list—and all I hope is that my body of work adds to our collective voice.
Uncanny Magazine: The story is structured around a set of rules. Which was your favorite rule (by whatever metric appeals to you—most fun to write, most surprising, most meaningful to the theme)? Which rule was the most difficult?
M. Olivas: Vaparu. Sangronas must always carry vaparu. Honestly it was the first rule I came up with, and I found it so funny, because it’s peak Mexican culture. It’s one of our stereotypes even, that we use vaparu for anything and everything in regard to health. I could have a bone sticking out of my arm and my abuela would just rub vaparu on it to make me better. It just made so much sense that it would be part of these girls’ routine. Honestly most of the other rules I just needed as entry points into the scenes I wanted to slow down in, and by the end of the story, having to come up with new ones for each bit started to feel tedious. At first I was writing the rule first, then the scene. By the time I was following the story’s moment to its climax, I was writing the scene first, rule second, and that was when I knew I had my completed story. If I pushed the story beyond that point, I use up all my readers’ goodwill.
Uncanny Magazine: What are some of your influences, either literary or in other media? What’s something that you read or watched recently and loved?
M. Olivas: Oh god have I not gone off about enough of that already? Obviously, I talked about Paris, Texas and horror films, but there are a few movies that really changed me when I saw them, down to my DNA. Dario Argento’s Suspiria may just be my favorite horror movie (Ridley Scott’s Alien is my favorite overall film). Whenever I think of incredible cinematography and color, I always refer back to how Argento used technicolor to create such a gorgeous, dreamlike horror film. The remake is also fantastic. Akira Kurosawa, John Carpenter, and Guillermo Del Toro’s bodies of work have been seminal influences not just with my own art, but with who I am as a person. I recently watched Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure for the first time too, and good lord, I’d never experienced such dread.
For both “Sangronas” and Sundown, I got a lot of inspiration by Near Dark, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, by Ana Lily Amirpour. Both are super atmospheric and heavy western gothics that explore vampirism in unique ways.
Oohhhh, I could go on. But I want to touch on literary influences—I am a writer after all, and am quite in love and in awe with what writers far greater than me have done with the written word—specifically Stephen Graham Jones, who’s been a huge influence on my work. I think he’s a horror’s juggernaut right now and for good reason. I’ve never felt such dread and raw emotion than when I read the last fifty pages of The Only Good Indians, and his work taught me how to use horror as a way to explore the external as well as the internal experiences of living as a minority in the United States.
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is also an author I adore. His prose is exquisite, and every page is just mind-blowing; every time I finish a line I wonder how the fuck did he do that? He, Stephen Graham Jones, and Carmen Maria Machado are the authors that show me what the medium can do, do everything I can only hope to achieve with my work, and do so with such skill and love and care that every time I finish something of theirs, I’m so ready to start writing again because I’ve been reminded just how powerful a story can truly be.
Uncanny Magazine: What are you working on next?
M. Olivas: I’m working on my second novel! And for once it’s actually not horror. Or. I’d consider it eco-horror, maybe. Oh well. But I’m in grad school right now, earning my MFA at San Jose State University, and the project I’ve been working on that will be my thesis is a novel that will allow me to go a lot deeper into Mesoamerican cultures as well as my obsession with dinosaurs. I won’t go into much detail yet, but think Aztecs and Dinosaurs, with my main inspirations being the films Nausicaӓ of the Valley of the Wind by Hayao Miyazaki, Embrace of the Serpent by Ciro Guerra, and Arundhati Roy’s novel, The God of Small Things.
My writing is where I can return to my childhood self and start playing with creature toys again. I don’t think I’ll be running out of creatures any time soon.
Uncanny Magazine: Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us!
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Caroline M. Yoachim is a three-time Hugo and six-time Nebula Award finalist. Her short stories have been translated into several languages and reprinted in multiple best-of anthologies, including four times in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. Yoachim’s short story collection Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World & Other Stories and the print chapbook of her novelette The Archronology of Love are available from Fairwood Press. For more, check out her website at carolineyoachim.com.