Grieving mother Magos cuts out a piece of her deceased eleven-year-old son Santiago’s lung. Acting on fierce maternal instinct and the dubious logic of an old folktale, she nurtures the lung until it gains sentience, growing into the carnivorous little Monstrilio she keeps hidden within the walls of her family’s decaying Mexico City estate. Eventually, Monstrilio begins to resemble the Santiago he once was, but his innate impulses—though curbed by his biological and chosen family’s communal care—threaten to destroy this fragile second chance at life.

A thought-provoking meditation on grief, acceptance, and the monstrous sides of love and loyalty, Gerardo Sámano Córdova blends bold imagination and evocative prose with deep emotional rigor. Told in four acts that span the globe from Mexico to Brooklyn to Berlin, Monstrilio offers, with uncanny clarity, a cathartic and precise portrait of being human.

'A Promethean fable about reconstruction, reinvention, and the occasional human-sized snack.' — Kirkus Reviews

Gerardo Sámano Córdova is a writer and artist from Mexico City living in Brooklyn. He is the author of Monstrilio. His stories have appeared in Apartmento Magazine, Catapult, The Common, Passages North, Chicago Quarterly Review, and others. He holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of Michigan and is the current Writer in Residence at Fordham University. Gerardo has also been known to draw little creatures.