Cynthia Pelayo walked into a bar the other day just after it opened. It was a weekday. The place was dead. Other than a bartender and the dead girl in the corner — a mannequin, dressed like a ghoul, in a long white gown and pale make-up. Pelayo jumped and laughed. She wasn’t here for a drink; she’s been sober for several years. She was here because Chet’s Melody Lounge in Justice is entwined with the legend of Resurrection Mary — that’s Mary in the corner — and Pelayo just wrote a novel weaving together a serial killer, the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, a plane crash at O’Hare, quantum entanglement, Chet’s and Resurrection Mary.
Her thrillers, becoming increasingly popular, bite off a lot, but always include some uncanny paranormal something or other, and a nod to the history of tragedy in Chicago.
Hailey Piper, a fellow bestseller and friend from Maryland, said she’s heard critics complain about the amount of Chicago history in Pelayo’s books. She heard people say they don’t want a history lesson when they read a novel. “And yet nobody complains when Stephen King goes on a 10-page tangent about Derry, Maine, and that’s not even a real place! In horror, setting is very important, and in Cynthia’s novels you get a real feel for Chicago, always with the reminder she’s critiquing a place she loves so much.”
Chet’s, Pelayo reminded me as we entered, leaves a bloody mary on the bar every night, in honor of Mary. As the local lore goes, a taxi driver on Archer Avenue picked up a strange woman who, during the ride, seemed to vanish. The driver stopped at Chet’s, to ask if anyone had seen the woman. The bar exploded in laughter.
You just met Mary, they said.
Pelayo, 44, long black hair, long face, head to toe in black, explained to the bartender we just stopped by to look around; she has a new book, “Vanishing Daughters,” partly set on Archer Avenue and about Mary. The bartender said she’ll have to read that one. Chet’s owners emerged from the back. Richard Prusinski, whose father, Chet, bought the century-old bar in the 1960s, has run it for years with his wife, Barbara. They inherited the ghost tours that stop by and tourists looking for a fright. Halloween is their Christmas. Sometimes a customer will say they danced with Mary.
The bartender, listening, said she’s heard strange knocks “but Mary’s fine if you just leave her be.” Pelayo nodded: “She’s not mean. She’s Chicago’s ghost, we love her.”
“You from the area?” Barbara asked.
“West of Logan Square,” Pelayo said.
“Always interested in local ghosts?”
“Oh, yeah. The devil baby at Jane Addams Hull House. Of course, all the gangster-related ghosts. … This area takes a lot of pride in those kind of stories, you know?”
Barbara stepped aside to reveal a backroom still decorated for St. Valentine’s Day as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, complete with gangster cutouts and faux bullet holes.
Outside, Archer Avenue is lonesome in the daylight, austere Resurrection Cemetery stretching along one side and depressed dusty parking lots and industrial-looking buildings lining the other side. Pelayo sent a lot of time around here while writing “Vanishing Daughters,” just as she spent a lot of time on the Chicago River while writing “Forgotten Sisters” (which draws on the S.S. Eastland ship disaster in 1915 that killed 844 passengers and crew) and walking around Humboldt Park lagoons while writing “Children of Chicago” (partly about the history of local children killed by neighborhood violence).
“At night, there’s nothing here,” she said, watching traffic hush past. “It’s like standing in nothing. There’s a lot of versions of the Mary story, but generally, she met a man at the Willowbrook Ballroom, they danced all night, he went to take her home, she vanished and now hitchhikes on Archer. Everyone knows this. I knew it as a kid. I came here at night to see what people see and it’s super dark, just nothing moving. What’s interesting is supernatural activity spiked after the first nuclear reactors (assembled in Hyde Park) were buried in Red Gate Woods nearby. Now people see black horses with fiery eyes, monks high in the tree tops. I mean, the Illinois-Michigan Canal isn’t far and some Irish immigrants who dug it out died then kind of slipped into the water and washed away …”
She could go on.
Her husband, Gerardo Pelayo, a senior IT analyst, said family trips sometimes get hijacked by his wife’s appetite for tragic histories. The couple and their two kids tried to hike Red Gate: “The first time we went, it was cold, kind of dark, rainy and we didn’t even make it to the (reactor) site. Cynthia felt something and said, we have to go now.”
Pelayo’s horror novels do not read like a lot of horror novels. They are light on jump scares and blood. They read less like contemporary horror than Gothic thrillers relocated to a 21st-century Midwest, layering in detective fiction, melodrama, a touch of lyrical literary ennui. History in her books — the legacy of local violence, the Iroquois Theater fire, the early silent film studios — plays like a mirrored reflection of the present. She doesn’t focus on monsters so much as their victims, ghouls with reasons. Becky Spratford, a local librarian and major tastemaker in the horror genre, said: “Cynthia doesn’t write the most violent horror out there but without question it’s some of the most disquieting. If you live in Chicago, you feel these stories in your guts.”
A Cynthia Pelayo novel also throws a fairy tale in there somewhere. “Forgotten Sisters” drew from the Little Mermaid, “Children of Chicago” had room for a Pied Piper luring children to their dooms. Her latest book finds some inspiration in Sleeping Beauty. She notes two reasons for this: As others have said, the flip side of Chicago’s history of tragedies is its incongruous history as a birthplace of magic — the writing of “Wizard of Oz,” the home of Walt Disney. Her parents, who came to Chicago from Puerto Rico and settled in Hermosa — where Pelayo and her family still reside — “couldn’t read English well, so they recounted fairy tales and lullabies, which became a place of comfort. I still feel like if I have a fairy tale for the scaffolding of a story I can tell it.”
So far, it’s worked.
This will be a big year for Pelayo: Other than “Vanishing Daughters,” two of her earlier novels from independent publishers — and her debut story collection, “Lotería,” which she self-published in 2012 (after using it as her MFA thesis for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago) — are being reissued soon by a major publisher, Hachette. “Vanishing Daughters,” meanwhile, is published by Amazon imprint Thomas & Mercer. Jessica Tribble, Amazon’s editorial director, told me: “I’m a huge fan. I love how she finds a way to weave familiar tales into a modern story. She touches on Sleeping Beauty even as she asks what it means for Chicago to be a city with a history of serial killers. She is making fairy tales part of the zeitgeist — yet reminding us fairy tales were often cautionary for a reason.”
We went across the street to Resurrection Cemetery. We checked in at the front office, so they knew why two people were casually using a cemetery parlor to talk. The woman at the counter said she never heard of Resurrection Mary, which sounded like something she tells tourists. “Oh, Mary’s not with us,” Pelayo explained. “She’s a ghost.”
“I haven’t seen her,” the woman replied blankly.
Thoroughly ghosted, we sat.
She doesn’t believe in ghosts, Pelayo told me. She’s told others she doesn’t believe in an afterlife, or a heaven or a hell. “Children of Chicago,” which put her on the map, was her way of writing about growing up in Hermosa, at the poverty line, touched often by crime. As she started on “Vanishing Daughters,” her father died of cancer. She was thinking of how to get across “the way grief manifests emotionally and spiritually,” while also touching on the history of Chicago women whose murders have gone unsolved. She saw Mary as a vehicle. “A lot of murdered people get victimized after their deaths. There are so many versions of a vanishing hitchhiker story, for instance, but usually they’re malicious — they’re monsters. What if Mary was a murder victim trapped in an existential loop, wandering Archer Avenue when all she wants is to get home?”
Pelayo lived in Puerto Rico until she was 2. Her household was very strict, she said, her parents conservative Catholics who nevertheless relished casually retelling — “so matter of factly” — stories of kidnapped cousins never seen again and childhood friends found dismembered in dumpsters. She said she wasn’t allowed to have many friends, and was rarely allowed to leave the house. She remembers watching a lot of horror movies, and “because I didn’t go to preschool, my dad would take me on the train downtown and get popcorn and go to the Division Street bars so he could talk to his buddies while I played Pac-Man. He would just take me everywhere since he loved the history of Chicago, so I was constantly being shown it. I also remember someone called me a (racial epitaph) my first day at Columbia College. I told him I was never going back. He said he had police dogs attack him in the ‘60s. He had local coffee shops not serve him when they heard his accent — but I wasn’t going back to school because someone called me one racist name? He was right and I went back and graduated with honors.”
“Vanishing Daughters” by Cynthia Pelayo, published on March 11, 2025. (Thomas & Mercer)
Gerardo was friends with his future wife in high school, though he remembers her as a teenager being intimidating, an authoritative ROTC member “who let how she felt be known and didn’t shrink from exchanging looks or words in hallways. She was always a target.” She was allergic to any kind of bureaucratic authority and was frequently suspended.
She wanted to go to Columbia and become a fiction writer but her father (“who came to America with $6 in his pocket”) would tell her, “No, you should be like Ted Koppel.” So she settled on journalism, then went to Roosevelt University for marketing. She worked for two decades at Ipsos, doing marketing research in the corporate reputation division.
She was good at it, she said, but she was never happy. She told her husband she was going back to school to get her MFA in fiction writing. “I was surprised, yes,” he said. “We had made it out of the inner city and now we were traveling and we had kids and we were running marathons and we had a cute dog — but Cynthia wasn’t really fulfilled.”
At SAIC, her advisors told her that she was a horror writer who didn’t know it. She wrote poetry about true crime. She wrote books of poetry. Inspired by “Devil in the White City,” she started “Children of Chicago” as a blend of history, detective thriller and horror. At first, the mix was daunting: “Nobody would represent me because the fiction and the history would be separate chapters. I would hear that I wrote like someone who didn’t know how to write. So I started to learn how to spread out the nonfiction in the fiction.”
She began to win awards, an International Latino Book Award, a Bram Stoker Award — the Oscars of horror writing. Yet, as her star rose, she said she experienced racism, classism, sexism — “a lot of insinuation, a lot of it online, and from corners of the (horror) community, who seemed to think this stuff wasn’t meant to be written by certain people.”
She began to regret that, despite having broader aims, she was largely identified as a horror writer. Her agent, Lane Heymont of New York-based Tobias Literary Agency, said: “She’s one of the top women in horror right now, the first Latinx person to win a Bram Stoker, and authors are prone to being jealous. The more attention you get, the more people want to publicly feed on you in this business. But also, publishers used to think of horror as a white man’s game — they knew Stephen King and that’s about it. But horror is on the rise now, and those same people are having to get used to all the women and people of color with major roles in this genre.”
Indeed, the most interesting new horror voices of the past decade — Victor LaValle, Stephen Graham Jones, Jessica Johns, Alma Katsu, Carmen Maria Machado, Oyinkan Braithwaite, Nick Medina, Gus Moreno — have been Indigenous, Latino or writers of color. As Pelayo and I talked, a young Latina in the cemetery office stopped to say hi.
“I love your books,” she told Pelayo.
“Thank you! I’m here because my new book — ”
“‘Vanishing Daughters’!”
“Right! It’s set on Archer.”
“I’m so excited to read it.”
When she left, Pelayo leaned over: “I have to accept I am getting more public. I didn’t realize that could happen. I told my husband we can’t fight in public anymore. Scary!”
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
