Queen of the Cicadas by V. Castro

I would like to thank Anne from Random Things and Flame Tree Press for an advance copy o this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher – Flame Tree Press

Published – Out Now

Price – £9.95 paperback £5.99 Kindle eBook

2018 - Belinda Alvarez has returned to Texas for the wedding of her best friend Veronica. The farm is the site of the urban legend, La Reina de Las Chicharras - The Queen of The Cicadas.

In 1950s south Texas a farmworke r- Milagros from San Luis Potosi, Mexico, is murdered. Her death is ignored by the town, but not the Aztec goddess of death, Mictecacíhuatl. The goddess hears the dying cries of Milagros and creates a plan for both to be physically reborn by feeding on vengeance and worship.

Belinda and the new owner of the farmhouse - Hector, find themselves immersed in the legend and realize it is part of their fate as well.

Revenge is a staple part of horror. Ghosts often represent a seeking for retribution. Curses, monsters, and all manner of things that go bump in the night connected to crimes that go unpunished. Horror can represent outrage at events and alack of justice and its cure is perhaps bloodier than an imperfect justice system. In V Castro’s fascinating Queen of the Cicadas we have an unusual and surprising tale that delivers dark tales of magic, revenge and death.

Belinda Alvarez is feeling lost – her relationships are going nowhere, she is increasingly estranged from her son and has just quit her legal firm as it began to represent ICE. She visits her friend’s wedding back in Texas and discovers the venue is related to a childhood urban legend. The birthplace of a horrible crime that led to the creation of La Reina de Las Chicharras – The Queen of the Cicadas who you can summon if you call her name and legend. Belinda gets fascinated in the story behind the legend and investigates meeting people connected to a bloody murder in 1952 where Milagros an immigrant from Mexico worked on a farm and found herself bullied and murdered by a group of Texan women. In the aftermath strange deaths affected all those connected to the case. The more Belinda investigates the more interwoven in the legend she becomes, and she discovers that Milagros’ story goes back further than many suspected and has a key role for Belinda to now play.

I really loved the storytelling Castro deploys in this story and that what initially appears your standard revenge ghost story turns into a bigger and more mythic tale. We move from Belinda in the modern day a lost soul trying to find a new direction to the Texas of 1952. Castro explores the life of Mexican immigrants on farms created with disdain and very overt racism. Castro shines a light on the racism within America and notes this is also the time the Ku Klux Klan were lynching Black Americans – the lack of caring when she is found brutally murdered and that her murderers feel they can get away with such a crime speak volumes for the attitudes of the time. This leads to a very satisfying group of murders against those who acted or turned a blind eye to such a crime. Castro has a great way of making these scenes feel darkly tense and disturbing.

If that revenge tale was the story, it would itself have been satisfying but what I think really impressed me about this novel is how Castro then expands ithe tale in different directions. Belinda importantly wants to give Milagros some identity and understand her story – she is not just the victim or a ghost she was a human being and her quest to discover more leads her into understanding life in Mexico in the early 1950s. We explore social strata as we see Milagros was actually gay in a very conservative time and getting unwanted attention from a powerful young man (which also shows Milagros has always had unusual supernatural events around her) but the most interesting twist is as Belinda investigates, she captures social media attention firstly just in the form of tv ghost hunters but as events get wilder and more death follows national media leads to people picking up on the La Reina myth. Underlying all of this is a link to an ancient Aztec Goddess of Death Mictecacihuatl who slowly pulls the strands across time and space for her own plans of revenge. Ultimately Castro leads the tale right up to the modern era of exactly who is La Reina for – revenge or justice? Are our cast victims, pawns, or willing accomplices – the ambiguity of the tale continues until the very last few pages in a very satisfying conclusion and giving the tale a wonderful mythic quality of how urban legends are in many ways always linked to much older stories.

Castro is a fascinating character focused writer able to capture Belinda’s weariness at the world and hunger for some direction but adds in a host of characters good and bad into this tale even if just for a few pages before they meet their fate. This is a great story for horror fans offering something initially familiar but giving it a distinctly twenty first century twist as we see how people’s hunger for an old legend leads to something resembling a new religion. Surprising, intelligent and unnerving I definitely recommend it!