Welcoming Cynthia Pelayo

Flame Tree Press welcomes Bram Stoker Award-winner Cynthia Pelayo to the blog to talk about her story “Self-Portrait”, which appears alongside a stellar line-up in the groundbreaking anthology This Way Lies Madness, releasing in September in our celebrated Beyond & Within series. In the introduction to the work, the book’s co-editors, Dave Jeffery and Lee Murray, say the anthology “defies convention by bringing together authentic, sensitive portrayals of mental illness in a genre that has notoriously lacked such tenets.” Comprising 23 stories and poems, the book also includes accompanying vignettes offering insight into the authors’ motivation for their work.

Today, Cynthia Pelayo shares an excerpt from her story along with a short glimpse into her inspiration.

Excerpt:

     She was tall and slender, wearing a long black wool coat with black buttons. Her dark hair was long and straight. She wore black leather gloves. Her hands clasped in front of her, and I, I stood there perhaps gawking at her perfection, her sleek features and radiant skin.

     I myself felt heavy, run down, my hair a mess, in a white t-shirt and faded jeans and white sneakers, all of me splattered in red and blue and yellow and green acrylic paint, and all of me unsure when it was the last time I’d changed clothes or slept or ate. 

     This painting was not yet complete, and if it was not yet complete, then I was not yet completed and so I needed to remain here until it was done, until she was done.

Pelayo writes:

“What is creativity? What is madness? Is there a point in which the act of creation can cause the human spirit to spiral beyond themselves? In “Self-Portrait,” an unnamed artist challenges the mental and spiritual boundaries of these limits.”

As well as Pelayo’s story, Murray and Jeffery invite readers of This Way Lies Madness to discover “tales of trauma, dissociation, body dysmorphia, psychosis, depression, anxiety, and more, captured in all forms of horror from the extreme to the nuanced. There is jaw-dropping violence, skin-crawling body horror, and quirky dark humour, alongside the quiet, heartbreaking introspections of people spiralling into madness. Yet all the stories and poems in this volume are framed so that the insensitive, stereotypical presentations of mental illness commonly found in horror are resoundingly and appropriately absent.”

"A mesmerizing and remarkably ambitious mosaic of delicate minds possessed, of spoiled and haunted hearts, of gaping wounds both seen and unseen. This Way Lies Madness weaves a beguiling and profoundly revealing tapestry of psychological terror with such nuance and depth in each collected story." – Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

Cynthia Pelayo is a Bram Stoker Award and International Latino Book Award-winning author and poet. Her novels include Vanishing Daughters, Forgotten Sisters, Children of Chicago and The Shoemaker’s Magician. In addition to writing genre-blending novels that incorporate elements of fairy tales, mystery, detective, crime, and horror, Pelayo has written numerous short stories, the poetry collection Crime Scene, the story collection Loteria, and is editor of the upcoming Ghosts of Where We Are From, An Anthology of Latinx Horror. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She lives in Chicago with her family. For more information, visit www.cinapelayo.com.

This Way Lies Madness is out September 9th 2025: Pre-Order Now