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.
Continue reading “Rooted by Leopoldo Goût: A horror novel about memory, history, and ancient gods”