Fantasmas: Puerto Rican Tales of the Dead

by Charlie Vázquez

These stories range from tales told to the author as a child, to fictional accounts interweaving erotica, fantasy, and suspense elements in the rural and urban Gothic; part homage to the ancestors who lurk immortal in family folklore, part stories of imagination where specters emerge from the darkness to taunt and torment. From the terrors of the Great Depression to the devastation following Hurricane María, these tales chronicle the resistance and spirit of the Puerto Rican people; a testament to survival and perseverance in the face of disaster and the phantoms awaiting us when we turn off the lights. "Charlie Vázquez revisits the history of Puerto Rico and its diasporas, telling the stories of our dead. Using a textual tonality that brings Edgar Allan Poe and Horacio Quiroga to mind, Vázquez creates wonderfully crafted stories about souls who perish in the Great Depression, young widows drowned in hurricanes, soldiers recruited for medical experiments, and ladies of the night succumbing to vice. With an all-encompassing eye, Vázquez digs deep into various moments in Puerto Rican history to tell the stories of our terror, stories that endure in the realm of phantasms, trapping the living in a limbo that also turns them into transparent, yet present, traces of collective trauma. Finally, a book about our persisting ghosts written with a clarity that can help us conjure collective memory so we can move forward." Mayra Santos-Febres, author and founder of Festival de la Palabra de Puerto Rico

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Latinx

230 pages, Paperback

Published April 1, 2020

About the author

Charlie Vázquez is the author of the novel Contraband (Rebel Satori, 2010). His fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous anthologies, including “The Death Angel of Santurce”, featured in San Juan Noir (Akashic, 2016). He coedited the anthology From Macho to Mariposa: New Gay Latino Fiction (Lethe, 2011) and appears in the graphic novel collection Ricanstruction (Somos Arte, 2018), which donates proceeds to hurricane relief in Puerto Rico. He contributed to the anthology Crashing Cathedrals (ITNA, 2019), which features essays by authors on their favorite Edmund White books. His latest collection of stories, Fantasmas: Puerto Rican Tales of the Dead, will come out in April 2020. Charlie directed the BCA Bronx Writers Center from 2014-2018 and lives in the Bronx.

Reviews

[Andy Weston · Rating 5 out of 5]

You can learn a lot about a country from reading about its folklore, and this is a fine example.
After thoroughly enjoying The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories, Volume 1 recently, I dug around trying to find collections of horror from other countries whose literature I had not read, and came across this. Vázquez would be an excellent inclusion for a subsequent Valancourt volume.
Puerto Rican culture has a long tradition of communicating with the dead. Six of the fourteen stories have been passed down between the generations, and salvaged by the author from his parents and grandparents. The other stories are Vázquez's own invention, and set in modern Puerto Rico, and based around drug use and crime, the island's politics, the Great Depression, and most notably, Hurricane Maria in 2017 (the deadliest US-based natural disaster in 100 years, with over 200,000 Puerto Ricans leaving for the mainland, many temporarily and some permanently. Island residents had no full power for almost a year).
It is no surprise that Poe is a strong influence on Vázquez. Tension builds like a ticking bomb as the characters in the stories interact. Fear and anxiety grow but they remain unaware. The inevitable detonation surprises and pleases immensely.

My favourites - Lure concerning the tapeworm extraction method in rural Puerto Rico in the 1950s, and Perfect Assassin about the hysteria caused by mosquitoes spreading a virus.

[Felice · Rating 4 out of 5]

My preference in horror is usually the slow-burn story: M.R.James, E.F.Benson, and Robert Aickman, for example, are masters of that, and those are the kind of horror stories I write. But there is certainly a case to vbe made for wild and wooly, everything out there, leave nothing and no one behind kind of horror story, and Fantasmas is exactly that. Charlie Vasquez manages to "make it new"-- "it" being those horror tales we loved as kids, Tales From the Crypt, and so on. Vasquez's unique spin is that he tilts the genre with with another genre we really have too little of: literature based on the folk stories of Puerto Rico. The flavor is strong, the takes are one of a kind, and the stories are vividly written, each one a little world to itself, or even a little movie. One story, "Esperanza" is a slow-burn, and that pays off in a very creepy way. I know nothing like Fantasmas, and I reccommend it.

[Fero136 · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found that -- thought the conceits were often interesting -- nearly each story ought to have been shorter; his writerly tic of verbless sentences was not my favorite. The stories in the forest were the strongest -- evoking the power, mystery and terror of the natural world.