Thank you so much for this opportunity. Below are five songs that I listened to on repeat while writing VANISHING DAUGHTERS. Many of them speak to a love that cannot exist in this reality, to the bending and blurring of reality, to memories, and finally to dreams which are featured heavily in the novel.
Someone You Loved by Lewis Capaldi
I included this on the soundtrack for Vanishing Daughters because one of the characters is in love with someone they lost, and they’ve lived their entire time on Earth grieving the ‘What if?’ of a life with them. They die never having loved anyone other than that person.
Now the day bleeds
Into nightfall
And you're not here
To get me through it all
I let my guard down
And then you pulled the rug
I was getting kinda used to being someone you loved
Pictures of You by The Cure
Another sad love song. I included this song because it speaks so much to the memory of someone who is no longer there. Or, to a time that cannot be repeated. All that exists are these pictures and no matter how hard you look at these photographs they are not that person. They can never be that person.
I've been looking so long at these pictures of you
That I almost believe that they're real
I've been living so long with my pictures of you
That I almost believe that the pictures are all I can feel
Evangeline by Stephen Sanchez
All the love songs, right? This novel is influenced by several variations of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale and these lyrics just resonated with that theme. I had this song on repeat for many, many, many hours while writing this novel.
Do you need The Sandman?
Or a phone call to Mr. Jones? Oh
I'll put your dreams to sleep
With rattling bones
So, don't go to sleep, don't rest your head
I'll be the pillow, and I'll be the bed
Holding your dreams as you lie to rest
Never Really Mine by The Lumineers
This is such a deep and sad song, and it’s those first few words that sting, “Love was not designed for time. You were never really mine.” This is the perfect song for the ghostly love story within the novel, a love that can never exist in this reality, but maybe another?
Love was not designed for time
You were never really mine
Find a love, I was leveled at the sight of you
You were wrong, what I needed was a little clue
Phantasm by Life on Venus
This is the song that I consider to be the main highlight to the novel. The lyrics almost feel like it’s telling the story of what is happening on the page. There’s the sense that the main character’s reality is ending, but then there’s this blur of dream and wakefulness. Finally, there’s this sense that she just has to make it through this trial in order to survive.
My dear friend
What if I told the world will end today?
Hold my hand
It will destroy the things we love and hate
It's a dream
Everything goes as supposed to
And the steam
Blurring its lines to expose you
A haunted woman stalked by a serial killer confronts the horrors of fairy tales and the nightmares of real life in a breathtaking novel of psychological suspense by a Bram Stoker Award–winning author.
It started the night journalist Briar Thorne’s mother died in their rambling old mansion on Chicago’s South Side.
The nightmares of a woman in white pleading to come home, music switched on in locked rooms, and the panicked fear of being swallowed by the dark…Bri has almost convinced herself that these stirrings of dread are simply manifestations of grief and not the beyond-world of ghostly impossibilities her mother believed in. And more tangible terrors still lurk outside the decaying Victorian greystone.
A serial killer has claimed the lives of fifty-one women in the Chicago area. When Bri starts researching the murders, she meets a stranger who tells her there’s more to her sleepless nights than bad dreams—they hold the key to putting ghosts to rest and stopping a killer. But the killer has caught on and is closing in, and if Bri doesn’t answer the call of the dead soon, she’ll be walking among them.
Mystery Cozy | Horror [Thomas & Mercer, On Sale: March 11, 2025, Trade Paperback / e-Book , ISBN: 9781662513930 / ]
Cynthia Pelayo is a Bram Stoker Award winning and International Latino Book Award winning author and poet.
Pelayo writes fairy tales that blend genre and explore concepts of grief, mourning, and cycles of violence. She is the author of Loteria, Santa Muerte, The Missing, Poems of My Night, Into the Forest and All the Way Through, Children of Chicago, Crime Scene, The Shoemaker’s Magician, as well as dozens of standalone short stories and poems.
Loteria, which was her MFA in Writing thesis at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was re-released to praise with Esquire calling it one of the ‘Best Horror Books of 2023.’ Santa Muerte and The Missing, her young adult horror novels were each nominated for International Latino Book Awards. Poems of My Night was nominated for an Elgin Award. Into the Forest and All the Way Through was nominated for an Elgin Award and was also nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Poetry Collection. Children of Chicago was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award in Superior Achievement in a Novel and won an International Latino Book Award for Best Mystery. Crime Scene won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Poetry Collection. The Shoemaker’s Magician has been released to praise with Library Journal awarding it a starred review.
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