Rooted by Leopoldo Goût: A horror novel about memory, history, and ancient gods

What if the past isn’t really the past? In Rooted, Leopoldo Goût turns a woman’s return to Mexico City into a terrifying confrontation with buried memories, ancient gods, and a world that refuses to remain neatly separated into the categories modern humanity has created for it. The result is a horror novel that is as much about our relationship to the world around us as it is about supernatural terror.

Rooted, which releases September 15, 2026, follows Aurora, a successful art lawyer who returns to Mexico to celebrate a campaign she helped lead to repatriate stolen artifacts, including a mysterious statue of an Aztec god known as the Flayed One. But her homecoming quickly becomes unsettling. Mexico City is familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, and Aurora begins to experience impossible memories, disturbing dreams, and increasingly frightening distortions of reality. There is nothing wrong with Aurora—or at least, that is what everyone keeps telling her.

At the heart of Rooted is an idea that feels particularly appropriate for a horror novel: human beings are not as separate from one another, or from the world around us, as we like to believe. Modern society tends to place humanity at the center of everything, treating nature as something that exists for our benefit and the past as something that can be safely contained in museums. But the Indigenous peoples of what is now Mexico understood something that modern humans have largely forgotten: everything is connected.

Mexico City provides an especially powerful setting for that idea. The modern city exists on top of the ancient civilization that once occupied the same space, a civilization that understood how to live in relationship with the natural world. The old city was built around the lake and worked with its environment to sustain its people. The modern city instead built over the lake bed, effectively treating the landscape beneath it as something that could simply be conquered and ignored. Yet the lake has not disappeared just because humans decided to build on top of it. Mexico City is sinking, a physical reminder that the things we attempt to separate from ourselves do not necessarily stop being connected to us.

Aurora’s experience mirrors that larger conflict. When she returns to the Mexico City of her childhood, she recognizes the city but cannot quite reconcile it with what she remembers. Her memories don’t behave the way memories are supposed to. Her dreams seem to contain things that should be impossible. As her experiences become more frightening, it is easy to wonder whether she is suffering some kind of psychological break. The horror becomes particularly effective because Aurora—and the reader—are left questioning where the boundaries between memory, hallucination, history, and supernatural reality actually lie.

And then there are the secrets. Aurora’s mother and Abuela have spent years trying to protect her by keeping the truth about her past hidden. Their intentions may have been loving, but their secrecy has consequences. Aurora is now an adult, fully capable of deciding for herself what to do with the knowledge that has been withheld from her. Instead, her mother continues to insist that some things are better left unknown, even as those secrets begin to wreak havoc on Aurora’s life.

That dynamic adds another layer to the novel’s exploration of interconnectedness. Secrets do not exist in isolation. What one generation chooses to hide can shape the lives of the next. Trying to protect someone from the past does not necessarily prevent the past from finding them. Sometimes it simply means they encounter it without the knowledge or tools they need to understand what is happening.

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The artifacts Aurora has helped bring home are treated by the modern world as remnants of a culture that no longer exists—as historical objects that can be recovered, catalogued, displayed, and studied. But Rooted asks us to consider what happens when we are wrong about that assumption. What if the culture isn’t dead at all? What if it has merely been sleeping?

That question is where the novel’s horror becomes especially compelling. The supernatural elements aren’t simply intrusions into an otherwise ordinary world. They challenge the idea that the ordinary world is what we think it is in the first place. The ancient gods and artifacts aren’t merely relics of something that happened long ago. They are part of a living history that modern society has tried to reduce to objects and stories.

And Aurora may be the one person capable of waking it back up.

Goût creates a sense of mounting unease as Aurora is forced to confront a past she has spent her life not understanding. Her journey is frightening not only because of what she discovers, but because of what those discoveries mean. The more she learns, the harder it becomes to maintain the comfortable illusion that the past is separate from the present, that humanity is separate from nature, or that we can simply build over the things we would rather forget.

Rooted is ultimately a story about what happens when those boundaries collapse. It is horror rooted in history, memory, family, place, and the natural world, with a central character caught between the modern world she knows and an older reality that has been waiting beneath it. And perhaps that is the most unsettling idea of all: We may believe we have moved beyond the past, but the past may not believe it has moved beyond us.

Rooted raises some fascinating questions about the relationship between humanity, nature, history, and the cultures we too often treat as relics of the past. Do you think modern society has become too disconnected from the natural world—and what happens when the things we try to bury refuse to stay buried? I’d love to hear your thoughts. Share your take on Rooted in the comments below!

An advance reader copy of this book (ARC) was provided to me by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

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• Leopoldo Gout: From immigrant to Hollywood power player and author (Huff Post)

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