First published 2026
Aurora has built a successful career as an art lawyer, and she returns to Mexico City to celebrate a major victory: securing the repatriation of stolen artifacts, including a mysterious statue of an Aztec god. She plans to care for her ailing mother while she's home, but Mexico City feels different than she remembered. Her childhood home unsettles her. Her own memories seem unreliable. Strange elements from her past surface, hinting at darkness and supernatural power. The city streets themselves begin to crack and warp around her. Aurora's grip on reality loosens as her sanity starts to unravel. She must dig into her family's buried secrets and confront a terrifying truth: The Flayed One, an ancient Aztec deity, refuses to stay buried. Some sicknesses cannot be healed, and Aurora's homecoming becomes a reckoning with forces she awakened but never understood.
Genres: fiction, horror, supernatural, adult, adult-fiction, psychological-horror
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, haunting, psychological, surreal, unsettling
Tropes: family-curse, homecoming, reality-distortion, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Mexico City
Period: contemporary
288 pages · Paperback · Tor Nightfire
Content warnings: death, mental-illness