In my experience, the term magic realism is often overused and stereotypical, spoken without much thought. - Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Categories should not act as straitjackets, and yet the magic realism label has sometimes strangled rather than liberated Latin American literature.

Thematically, I like to write quiet stories. I’m not a bang-bang kind of writer. I love, love Shirley Jackson. Stuff that is slow and builds up layer by layer. Sometimes my mother makes fun of me because of that. She’d rather that I have more shooting and spaceships going woooosh.

I wasn’t very much interested in what is called gothic romance or a female gothic. I was always more into what is termed the male gothic, which is gothic books that have supernatural elements, graphic violence, and that kind of stuff. Sometimes we also call it gothic horror, as opposed to what we consider to be the female gothic, which is more like Scooby-Doo types of stories. Jane Eyre kinds of tales, in which a young woman goes to a distant location, meets some dude, and then there’s some kind of mystery to unravel. There is a happy ending — that is mostly the desire of that kind of story...It’s a liminal category, the gothic, and this is one side of it. But I was always more into the horror gothic. Into the Draculas of the world and the Carmillas.