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Book Review: Crime Scene: Poetry by Cynthia Pelayo

Cover art for Crime Scene: Poetry by Cynthia Pelayo

Crime Scene: Poetry by Cynthia Pelayo

Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2022

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1947879515

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition ( Bookshop.org  |  Amazon.com  )

 

This collection follows up Into the Forest and All the Way Through, a collection of poems about missing and murdered women and girls from all 50 states intended to bring the victims of cold cases to light without exploiting them.

 

Crime Scene is a more straightforward story. It’s a narrative in verse of the discovery and investigation of a cold case leading to the capture of a serial killer, using a format of numbered “reports”. It explodes on impact and immediately crashes into the parents’ grief on notification, then backtracks to the discovery of the crime scene and body by a brother and sister. Then we meet our protagonist, Agent K, whose investigation is complicated by her history as a witness to the disappearance of a friend when she was a girl, leading to guilt, insomnia, and a drive to solve the case. Much of the story explores both her actions and mental state.

 

Pelayo also addresses issues with reporting on true crime. Report 0011 comments on exploitation, and Report 0054, the medical examiner’s report, interestingly is nonspecific in describing the age, race, and ethnicity of the victim, avoiding the trap of “white girl” syndrome.

 

Crime Scene is a lyrical, powerful, surreal exploration of the justice system, its failures, and the human consequences. Highly recommended.

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

 

Posted on February 20, 2023 by , Reply

Women in Horror Month: Book Review: Children of Chicago by Cynthia Pelayo

cover art for Children of Chicago by Cynthia Pelayo

( Bookshop.org  |  Amazon.com )

Children of Chicago by Cynthia Pelayo

Agora Books, 2021

ISBN: ISBN-10 : 1951709209

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition (pre-order: release date March 9, 2021)

 

 

The daughter of a Chicago policeman, Detective Lauren Medina has known the terrible trauma and tragedy of her city ever since the unsolved murder of her sister when they were both children. She is also a true believer in the power of the darkest fairytales to infiltrate ordinary lives. When someone begins tagging multiple spots in the city with the name “Pied Piper”, Lauren immediately realizes that the number of dead children is about to increase dramatically. Her evidence is a very old copy of Grimm’s fairytales she read as a child, a missing page from that book, and a magic rhyme that can call the Piper to get rid of any chosen victim.

 

Cynthia Pelayo is a master of her craft. In Children of Chicago, she creates a strong sense of place with brief descriptions of the city’s landmarks and its violent history. The familiarity of this location in the popular imagination heightens the supernatural effect of the fairytales on past and present sins that are destroying any hope of a better future through or for the community’s children. Within this cityscape, the mysterious Pied Piper, wearing a black suit and hat, appears frequently to a group of children who owe him for the horrible deeds they have requested him to perform. When he wants to, he transforms into a terrifying, bloody monster, hungry to collect his fees in human flesh. Pelayo moves expertly between human events and nightmarish fantasy suggesting that the two are not separate and that their intersection is a demonic one.

 

Part mystery, part fairytale, part psychological crime thriller, Children of Chicago will make you want to re-read fairytales as you wonder about their origins (based on true stories?) and try to figure out what Detective Medina really knows and how.  Best of all, by the climax of the book, like the Piper’s future victims, you’ll be looking into the shadows with a shiver hoping this scary tale is simply very good horror fiction.

Highly Recommended

Reviewed by Nova Hadley

Posted on February 13, 2021 by , Reply

Book Review: Into The Forest And All The Way Through by Cynthia Pelayo

A note from the editor:

It is the end of November and Monster Librarian still needs to raise the funds to pay for our hosting fees and postage in 2021. If you like what we’re doing, please take a moment to click on that red “Contribute” button in the sidebar to the right, to help us keep going!  Even five dollars will get us closer to the $45 we still need to keep going at the most basic level. We have never accepted paid advertising so you can be guaranteed that our reviews are objective. We’ve been reviewing and supporting the horror community for 15 years now, help us make it another year! Thank you! And now our review of  Into The Forest And All The Way Through by Cynthia Pelayo.

 

cover art for Into the Forest and All The Way Through

Into The Forest And All The Way Through by Cynthia Pelayo ( Bookshop.org | Amazon.com )

Burial Day Books, 2020

ISBN: 9781735693613

Available:  Paperback, Kindle edition

 

Through a collection of terrifying portraits, Cynthia Pelayo creates a true crime portfolio in her provocative book of poems Into the Forest and All the Way Through. Each poem memorializes a particular child or woman who was murdered or simply vanished never to be seen again. Some of the poems describe the victim and some the scene of the murder. Others give us a snapshot of tragic moments in time or suggest the final minutes of agony and fear that these people suffered.

 

Pelayo’s choice of genre lends itself well to revealing the random clues left behind pointing to abduction, the details of clothing collected from people trying hard to remember something that might prove useful to an investigation, and the cataloguing of the victim’s habits, interests, and favorite places. All of these fragments paint a picture in the reader’s mind of the terror of those whose lives have been taken and of those left behind to deal with either the finality of death or the suffering of never knowing what really happened or why. There are also some poems in the collection that depict the murderers: their brutality, lack of human emotion, and even glee in frustrating the efforts of loved ones wanting to find a body to bury.

 

The most bone-chilling poems are those that describe the things that scare us the most – what we can’t see and what we can’t stop. There is the woman “found stuffed in a chimney” where different people had lived for years without knowing she was there or the man who worked at a home for the disabled and took the life of “a sweet young woman” “like a child, innocent.” The abducted “island girls” whose pictures have been discovered in the ground are “singing their mourning songs” “pleading come find / Me.” The poems in this book forcibly call us to be aware of the thousands of “forgotten and ignored women,” the dangers that still exist, and the problems that have gone unsolved, just as their murders and disappearances have to this day. Recommended.

 

Reviewed by Nova Hadley

Posted on November 30, 2020 by , Reply