Lotería: Stories

The Mexican board game of Lotería is a game of chance--similar to bingo. However, in Lotería instead of matching up numbers on a game board, players match up images.

There are 54 cards in the Lotería game, and for this short story collection you will find one unique story per card based on a Latin American myth, folklore, superstition, or belief--with a slant towards the paranormal and horrific. In this deck of cards you will find murderers, ghosts, goblins and ghouls. This collection features creatures and monsters, vampires, werewolves and more.

Many of these legends existed long before their European counterparts--passed throughout the Americas via word of mouth, collected just like the tales the Brothers Grimm. These are indeed fairy tales--Latin American fairy tales--but with a horrifying slant.

Cynthia Pelayo is a Bram Stoker Award winning and International Latino Book Award winning author and poet. She writes fairy tales that blend genre and explore concepts of grief, mourning, and cycles of violence. She is the author of Loteria, Santa Muerte, The Missing, Poems of My Night, Into the Forest and All the Way Through, Children of Chicago, Crime Scene, The Shoemaker’s Magician, as well as dozens of standalone short stories and poems.