Isabel Canas

Cañas was completing a doctorate in medieval Islamic literature when she wrote The Hacienda, setting a gothic haunted-house story in Mexico just after the war of independence, with a priest who practises witchcraft learned from his grandmother. Vampires of El Norte moves to the Texas borderlands of the 1840s. She was born in the United States, spent part of her childhood in Mexico, and has lived in Egypt and Turkey. Both novels sit on the border between historical fiction and horror, and both take their supernatural material from the folk belief of the region rather than from European gothic.