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Few stories of editorial consecration match Silvia Moreno-Garcia's vertiginous rise during the early months of COVID-19. Described on her author website as "Mexican by birth, Canadian by inclination" (Moreno-Garcia 2020a), Moreno-Garcia was born in Baja California and raised in Mexico. She moved to Canada in 2004 and currently resides in Vancouver. Her literary career began soon after her move to Canada; her first short story appeared in the fantasy e-zine Deep Magic in 2006. In 2013, her first short-story collection, This Strange Way of Dying, was published by Exile Editions in Ontario. Moreno-Garcia operates her own micropress dedicated to horror books, Innsmouth Free Press, which has released various books and editorial projects. In 2015, her first novel, Signal to Noise, was released by Solaris in the UK. A prolific novelist ever since, her work took off to a new dimension of visibility with the 2019 publication of Gods of Jade and Shadow by Del Rey Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House dedicated to science fiction and fantasy, including the books stemming from the Star Wars franchise. With such a platform, Moreno-Garcia's readership blew up and the second novel in her publishing contract, Mexican Gothic, sold forty thousand copies in its first eight weeks in the market (McIntyre 2020). Consequently, Moreno-Garcia became a mainstay on new-releases tables and genre fiction shelves, publishing a total of five new books, three reissues and an article between 2020 and early 2022.
When an author irrupts in such a way in the literary landscape, there is a temptation to become the first critic to write a comprehensive article that reads her work as a whole—the kind of article that would become a mandatory entry in the bibliography of any study thereafter. This is particularly the case of Moreno-Garcia, who became well-known writing in her second language, and without a traditional background within the fields of literary production in Mexico, the US, or Canada. As she puts it in a tweet from July 28, 2020, "I didn't attend any workshops, MFAs, grad class for creative writing, etc. I did fine and English is not my first language. Nobody cares in publishing." This career trajectory lends itself to a variety of approaches to her work, from understanding the...