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The Possession of Alba Diaz is Haunting Historical Horror

By Matthew Jackson  |  August 21, 2025 | 10:01am
Books Reviews Isabel Cañas
The Possession of Alba Diaz is Haunting Historical Horror

Isabel Cañas’s debut novel, The Hacienda, quickly established her as a potent new voice in the horror genre in 2022, thanks to her grasp of period details, Gothic intrigue, and character. Now, with her third novel, The Possession of Alba Diaz, Cañas is back with another must-read piece of historical horror, drawing readers into a new era of Mexican history, a new supernatural subgenre, and a new story of a woman gripped by dark forces in a world she fights to control.

This time, Cañas takes us back to the Mexican state of Zacataces in the mid18th century, when Spanish colonists were seeking their fortune and plague was sweeping through the area. It’s here that we meet Alba Diaz, the adopted daughter of wealthy Spaniards who’s been pushed into a comfortable but cold betrothal by her family’s business interests. In an effort to escape the spread of disease, Alba, her family, and her future in-laws all decamp to an isolated village built around an old silver mine. It’s here, amid refineries thick with mercury and the strange class tensions between the mine’s wealthy owners and its workers, that something awakens, something old and dark and drawn to Alba. Soon, she finds herself facing everything from scary bouts of sleepwalking to the creepy feeling that something is alive and moving beneath her skin, and only her fiancé’s roguish cousin, Elias, seems to notice. 

As with her previous novels, Cañas’s grasp of the Gothic in The Possession of Alba Diaz is both immediate and spellbinding. This is a book about aristocrats crossing an ocean to claw deep into the Earth for wealth, only to awaken something with their greed. It’s a book about arranged marriage and the tension of real attraction versus. manufactured comfort, a book brimming with charged conversations, and a book that knows when to carefully and gracefully introduce the supernatural into what’s already a gripping narrative. A key factor in whether or not a historical horror novel works is whether or not you’d be interested in this world and these characters without the introduction of any horror elements, and through Alba’s point-of-view chapters, it’s clear that Cañas is just as invested in the time, place, and people of mid-1700s Zacatecas as she is with the possession narrative.

But that doesn’t mean that the possession narrative gets short shrift. For much of the book, Cañas shifts perspective between Alba and Elias, as they dance around each other and soon come to understand that they’re the only two people truly aware of whatever’s happening to Alba, and why it might be tied to the mine. They’re forced to play supernatural detective together, kindling buckets of sexual tension and strange bonding experiences, and Cañas’s prose leaves us deeply invested in how each of them perceives the same situation, how they evolve because of it, and how it all builds to a supernatural climax. As she did with The Hacienda and her second novel, Vampires of El Norte, Cañas delicately plays with the tropes laid out before her without ever making the book feel like something hemmed in by the borders of genre. It’s both recognizably a possession narrative and a story that’s willing to break with the traditions of the subgenre to do something that feels true to who Alba and Elias are: Two searchers who didn’t know that what they were looking for might be each other.

If you’re a horror reader who needs your scares to come fast and ferocious, The Possession of Alba Diaz might take a little getting used to. Cañas’s deft balance of the historical and the horrific, the Gothic and the gruesome, is a more luxurious reading experience, focused on immersion and emotion and the steady thrum of Gothic dread. If you’re able to sink into its depths, though, and let it surround you, it becomes one of the most rewarding pieces of horror fiction you’re likely to find this year, a sexy and hypnotic journey from one of the genre’s best rising stars.

The Possession of Alba Diaz is available now wherever books are sold. 

Matthew Jackson is a pop culture writer and nerd-for-hire who’s been writing about entertainment for more than a decade. His writing about movies, TV, comics, and more regularly appears at SYFY WIRE, Looper, Mental Floss, Decider, BookPage, and other outlets. He lives in Austin, Texas, and when he’s not writing he’s usually counting the days until Christmas.

 
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