Bruja’s Nest by Brenda LaTorre (Paperback) (PREORDER)

Fiction - Horror - Gothic - Feminist - Diversity and Multicultural

RELEASE DATE: 10/06/2026 (WILL SHIP DIRECTLY FROM OUR SUPPLIER'S WAREHOUSE)

The Love Witch meets Monstrilio in Bruja's Nest, where a young woman's abuse history and ambition erupt into body horror, class war, and monstrous motherhood.

Raised amidst poverty, alcoholism, and sexual abuse, Yolanda is determined to seize control of her future. When she starts work as an indentured servant on the Fernández De la Rosa estate, she realizes she can secure a place as the lady of the house: with a spell from the local bruja, she can trick their naive son into getting her pregnant.

But the fertility ritual―piercing her flesh, tucking a rooster's heart inside herself―begets more than she expected. Yolanda's body swells and seethes with infection, her few allies dwindle, and she delivers a massive egg under the watchful eye of Santa Muerte, the Mexican folk saint of death. The hacienda where she's been promised a permanent home is full of blasphemies, secrets, and bodies, and the family she's tied herself to is loyal only to wealth and power.

But Yolanda will do anything to protect her child, who deserves the love and safety she never had. Even if everyone insists he's a monster.

AUTHOR BIO: 

Brenda LaTorre holds an MFA from the University of Southern Maine and a Creative Writing Certificate from UCSD. Her stories have been published by Pyre Magazine, BDA Publishing, Collective Visions, and more. She was Editor of Popular Fiction for the Stonecoast Review and is currently a writing mentor in the WriteHive Mentorship Program. Bruja's Nest is her first novel. She lives in Mexico City.

"Bruja's Nest is a potent and startling literary incantation that invokes the most powerfully complex elements of magic, motherhood, and unflinchingly grotesque body horror. This is an uncompromising and deeply affecting work exquisitely scrawled in blood, fury, and pain." --Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

"Bruja's Nest is 100% twisty fun! It's Succession with gristle, the [chicken] heart of darkness, and Shirley Jackson if only she could have watched telenovelas. There's bizarro bravado on every page. ¡Felicidades, Brenda LaTorre! Sequel!" --Nancy Holder, NYT bestselling author and HWA Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

"Tense, boldly written, and fiercely addictive, Brenda LaTorre's debut novel Bruja's Nest is part class war telenovela, part shocking body horror, and every bit as wicked and biting as its conniving and irrepressible heroine. I am a major fan." --Robert Levy, author of The Glittering World and No One Dies from Love