I just read a post here where someone was talking about the frustration of not being able to recommend books that haven’t been translated into English, and it made me want to write this.

I’m Mexican, and I enjoy reading books in Spanish that sometimes never get translated. Even when I can find them on this site, there’s almost no activity around them. I try to follow people who read in Spanish so we can share more literature that hasn’t been translated, and when I post about those books, I do it in Spanish so we can recognize each other.

So I’m making this post to propose creating a small community. We can follow each other, discover more books in this language, and keep those conversations alive. If you’re interested in building a community of Spanish-language readers, feel free to share your recommendations here and start following others 💜

What’s your “ i don’t want to ever see this in my books”? For me I despise a miscommunication trope that’s written just to fill the plot when it’s a whole grown adult relationship. I also hate when the mmc gives the fmc a random cringy nickname. In fantasy I hate when books describe their fmc ( who apparently can take a whole kingdom down with her pinky finger) as someone with a body of a child like make it make sense?

Because I haunt (hehe) the horror book quests/forums, a common sentiment that I've been reading around, is this isn't even scary, why is it in a horror book quest. It really made think about how horror is one of the more misunderstood genres, mostly because people expect it to be one very specific thing. People usually picture gore, monsters, slashers, something obvious and extreme. But horror has never really stayed inside those lines. The definitions are actually quite blurry. The genre is meant to provoke feelings of fear, shock, unease, dread, etc. How it does that, changes.

I'm using examples primarily from Whispers in the Walls here, but horror can look like House of Leaves, where the fear comes from disorientation and the slow breakdown of reality. It can look like Rebecca, where nothing is technically chasing, but the atmosphere feels suffocating and wrong. It can look like Mexican Gothic, where the horror is rooted in family, control, and the loss of bodily autonomy. Outside of that quest, I can think of something like The Road, where the real terror isn’t monsters, but the emptiness of the world and what people become to survive it. Even fantasy can hold horror in it which is something along the lines of the fear of losing self, humanity, or a place in the world. That isn't to say every book that makes someone feel these feelings, is horror though. Blurry.

So horror isn’t just about what happens, but mainly the feelings it evokes. The problem with that, is that feeling is different for everyone. Everyone has a different threshold. Different fears. Some people are scared by graphic violence, while others are more affected by psychological dread, grief, isolation, or the idea that something is slightly off but no one else seems to notice. So I’ve read books that didn’t scare me at all, but completely haunted someone else. And I’ve read subtle stories that unsettled me more than any traditional horror novel ever has. It's truly such a personal genre. I've been loving horror since I watched Amityville Horror waay too early in life and even got to study it in university because I was so interested. There's so many interesting studies within horror.

I’m really curious though, is there a book that felt like horror to you, even if it wasn’t marketed that way? Or, has your definition of horror changed over time, are you scared by different things now than you were before?