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Tune Into A Tragedy
Mortal Vengeance II follows the survivors of a deadly academy tragedy as they navigate fame, fractured relationships, and a reality television circus, only to discover that their terrifying past is far from finished when a sinister killer returns. What new ideas did you want to introduce in part two?
The first two books relied heavily on Excelsior Academy conditioning the students to keep quiet—a silence that is already deeply ingrained in Dominican society. In Mortal Vengeance II, it’s quite the opposite. Shane wants them to speak, to expose their ugly truths and scars, and, ideally, to break down on camera. Ultimately, though, the core struggle remains the same: someone else is trying to control their identity and their voice.
I also wanted to explore as realistically as possible what would happen in the aftermath of the first book’s events. How would society react to this tragedy? There’s a popular saying in Spanish, “pueblo chico, infierno grande” (small town, big hell), which refers to how fast news travels and how everyone knows everybody else’s business. What would that actually look like on a national scale? What makes people tune into a tragedy?
Last but not least—and I hope this really comes through on the page—I wanted to ask: in this scenario, who is the true villain? Is it the Grim Cojuelo? Is it Shane Harper, the producer? Or is it the audience, including the readers themselves, consuming that trauma as entertainment?
How did you approach Alex Herrera’s moral complexity and his relationship with Melissa Rocha while balancing romantic vulnerability, lingering suspicion, and the threat of violence?
Alex was a massive challenge. In the first book, his morality is intentionally ambiguous—you’re not always sure if he’s the hero or the villain. When I wrote the prequel, A Grim Tale, I really upped the ante on his “villainy,” exploring who he was eighteen months prior. For the sequel, the struggle was continuing his arc realistically without sanitizing him. I had to preserve what makes Alex who he is, without undoing the growth he experienced by the end of Book 1. And how would that look? Would his actions inadvertently trigger another round of murders? That was going to be the original route, but instead of perhaps going to the obvious path, and in order to find that balance, I had to look inward.
Alex is partially based on me—at the very least, he inherited my borderline personality disorder. I had to really meditate on my own growth and struggles since my BPD diagnosis. How do I cope with it? What does it actually mean day-to-day? I wanted to bring that to the page as honestly and realistically as I could.
It’s funny, because when I was fifteen and wrote the original Mortal Vengeance draft back in 1999, I actually did write a trilogy. But with the reboot for the 2020s, a lot had to change. The 2025 ending is completely different and the “reboot” sets up this reality TV circus—which I initially wrote as a joke, knowing I’d eventually have to pay it off! Plus, back in 1999, A Grim Tale didn’t exist to inform his backstory.
When returning to Alex and Melissa’s relationship, there were elements from that original draft I wanted to keep. Amongst them, where they are at the end of that story. But because the new ending shifted everything so drastically, making their dynamic feel earned was a huge challenge. I absolutely refused to eliminate Melissa’s agency or make her naïve, just as I refused to make Alex’s growth a lie. The lingering suspicion and trust issues had to remain intact, especially when the threat of violence makes trusting the wrong person potentially fatal.
Without spoiling the reveal, the tension shows up early — in Melissa and Ana Sofía’s first conversation in Santo Domingo — and later, in the Real Scholars episodes, her fear actually comes to life. They hide from the show’s audience and from readers how their relationship evolved. Yet there are hints — in that same chapter and later ones — of how Melissa goes from “just a friend” at the end of Mortal Vengeance to where they are now.
Most importantly, Melissa is never a damsel in distress, or just “the female love interest,” she has her own agency and we see how she could potentially even rival Alex’s own methods.
What inspired you to transform the survivors of Excelsior Academy’s tragedy into reality television stars, and how does that premise deepen the story’s psychological tension?
The idea grew out of observing influencer culture and the pressure to turn everyday life into content. People put on these performances and adopt haughty personas that really make you wonder: are they actually like this? Their lives revolve around capturing everything on camera, which creates this false sense of invincibility—as if recording makes them untouchable. The real-world cases of influencers being attacked mid-filming prove otherwise.
From a storytelling perspective, the reality show first appeared as a joke at the end of Book 1 that I knew I’d eventually have to pay off. It could’ve just been a footnote for the sequel—something that happened in the years between books—but where’s the fun in that? In Mortal Vengeance: A Grim Tale, there’s a scene where Julián’s mind is almost completely gone, and he hallucinates his friends and the faculty as part of a reality TV show. In such a dark story, it brought a needed moment of levity, which ultimately convinced me to fully commit to the premise.
I love a good reality TV show—The Real Housewives, Below Deck, RuPaul’s Drag Race. We watch these people and think we really know what they’ve been through, but do we? After every season of Drag Race, queens come out to reveal production secrets; after every Housewives episode, they’re online, on the aftershows, or on Watch What Happens Live! breaking down what was truly happening. We only ever get half the story. That’s why you always have to watch Untucked. But sometimes those cameras capture things the cast doesn’t want seen—secrets caught on hot mics, or displays of wealth that don’t match the story they’ve been telling.
All of this makes us believe we know them—that we have a right to know what’s going on. Viewers can become so invested in a relationship like Kyle Richards and Mauricio Umansky’s that the heartbreak doesn’t stay theirs. They go online trying to get them back together, scolding them, having meltdowns over it. We believe that since we watch them on TV, they owe us. It’s the same dynamic between the British royal family and the public. And what does that make the audience? What does that make the readers?
Well, in Mortal Vengeance II: To Reel or Not Too Real?, the real villain is the reader.
How many podcasts and TV shows are out there just feeding our obsession with people who have suffered? Look at the Jeffrey Dahmer show on Netflix, or the massive obsession with true crime podcasts. We, as an audience, enjoy it, consume it, and believe it’s our right to have it. The worst part is that we are not passive participants—we don’t just sit and watch. We love to report on it, engage in online discussions, attack celebrities online while disregarding whatever situation they might be going through, and worst of all, just like the audience in the book, if we have the chance, we pull our phones out and record them. We actively create the content. In the story, Shane Harper might bring the product to the people, but the people demanded that product—she’s just capitalizing on it. We keep forgetting that the people featured there—whether they’re the heroes, the victims, the survivors, or the ones who didn’t make it, along with their families—are real people. They aren’t just content.
That inherent disconnect is exactly how the premise deepens the psychological tension. By removing the narrator during the reality TV moments and broadcasts in Mortal Vengeance II, I was able to hide the characters’ interiority, reflections, and true intentions. It allows the reader to see exactly what is being presented on screen—surface level only—and leaves them wondering, only to blindside them later with what was really happening or what was edited out.
Plus, it perfectly sets up the mystery for the third book. Let me put it like this: the cast desperately wanted the raw footage from that Casa de Campo trip, and some characters had no idea there were cameras installed in their homes. Trust me, you are going to want to see what’s on that USB.
How do Santo Domingo’s cultural traditions, class dynamics, and Dominican humor shape the characters’ identities and influence their responses to fame and trauma?
When I started writing the Mortal Vengeance series, I never set out to make Santo Domingo the selling point. To borrow from Mean Girls, I wasn’t trying to “make fetch happen.” I wanted to explore themes of guilt, complicity, and silence. Yet slowly but surely, the cultural, historical, and social elements of the city naturally shaped the characters and the narrative.
Santo Domingo is a city of extremes; there’s extreme poverty right next to extreme wealth. The reality of everyone’s household is different, and I wanted to show that through Shane’s assistant and characters like Camila and Mario. But I didn’t want to make poverty a comedy beat or something for the reader to view with pity, just as I didn’t want to rely on the cliché that wealth automatically equals bad or spoiled. There’s a lot of nuance there. It was important to understand exactly why characters like Rafa, Camila, and Valeria would join the TV show and willingly accept being labeled as villains, and conversely, why characters who had money—like Alex, Melissa, Mónika, and Lucía—would stay on the show when they didn’t have to. But hey, did Lisa Vanderpump join The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills or Vanderpump Rules because she needed the money?
After college, I left Santo Domingo and moved to New York to get my master’s degree at NYU, living there for four years before moving to Spain. In both the US and Spain, whenever I discuss growing up in Santo Domingo, one of the things that consistently shocks people is the fact that I grew up with maids. Having domestic help was normal in the environment I grew up in. But upon hearing this, people immediately formed an opinion about who I was, how much money my family had, or assumed we were exploitative. I knew introducing Mary, Alex’s maid, was going to invite that exact same judgment upon him. I wanted to show the deep love Mary and Alex have for each other without pretending that affection erases the inequality within that relationship. In a society where people like Mary have limited employment options, domestic work can help support their families and give their children a real chance to escape poverty, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t question the conditions that limit those options in the first place. Shane’s assistant is the same story told from a different angle: the job looks like proximity to power, but it comes with the same precarity—the same limited options, the same dependence on someone else’s goodwill.
I also wanted to bring balance to the depiction of religion in the Mortal Vengeance universe. I’m a man of faith—the full católico, apostólico, romano—and there’s a clear distinction in the book between faith itself and religious authority. In the Dominican Republic, religion is a massive aspect of our lives, and I wanted to be honest about that, showing that not all priests are evil and depicting how families genuinely rely on their beliefs. That distinction shows up most personally in Doña Silvia, who is entirely based on my mom. If Alex is based on me, Doña Silvia is my mother on the page. In the story, she retells taking Alex to a basilica to ask la Virgen de la Altagracia to save him because of health issues he had as a baby. I pulled that straight from my own life; I had those health issues, and my mom really did take me there. And if you asked her today if it worked, she would most likely give you the exact same answer Doña Silvia gives: “Have you met Alex? I’m not sure that little head of his is screwed on tightly.”
Beyond their reasons for joining the show, class shapes how much each character can afford to lose. It also influences how they are viewed and treated, something the scene at Restaurante Julieta shows perfectly. The b-roll sections deepen the question further: would people really care as much if the victims had been children from poor families? Class is also what ultimately drives the wedge between Alex and Mario. What does it do to someone’s self-esteem to be surrounded by so much wealth—money spent carelessly—while they can barely afford to be in the room? To be constantly watched, knowing you are one mistake away from poverty? There’s a huge disparity in the Dominican Republic, and we see that displayed in Mario’s story: his job, the opportunities he has, and how living in the exact same city and facing the exact same storm can affect families so differently.
When it comes to humor, Dominican humor can be quite inappropriate. We often joke and laugh even through our tears; it’s one of the ways we cope and keep going. That comes through heavily in how the characters process grief and trauma in the story. Fair warning, though: my mother finds my dark humor “not amusing,” and perhaps a bit cruel. Some would say it’s just British humor. I don’t know about that. I just know that growing up surrounded by a lot of hypocrisy, humor was the tool that helped me process it and call it out.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website
Three years ago, they survived the Grim Cojuelo massacre at Excelsior Academy. Now they are the stars of the reality show built on top of it.
The Real Scholars of Excelsior Academy has turned Santo Domingo’s most infamous survivors into household names: Melissa, the Final Girl who pulled the trigger. Alex, the bad boy whose prank started everything. Mónika, who carried a missing girl’s evidence to the police and brought the school down. Mario, who would like everyone to stop calling him the sidekick.
Now the missing girl is back. Lucía Salgado left behind the evidence that exposed Excelsior’s darkest secrets. After nearly three years gone, she has returned to Santo Domingo and joined the cast. She still won’t say where she was.
For executive producer Shane Harper, Lucía is the Emmy. The rest of her cast is healing, and therapy doesn’t win awards. So for Season Three she hides cameras in every home, hands a trio of fame-hungry newcomers their orders to draw blood, and waits for Lucía to crack.
Then, an ocean away, the priest who escaped Excelsior’s reckoning opens an unsigned letter: THE DEVIL WILL COME AND COLLECT HIS DUE. By midnight, carnival bells are ringing in the dark.
Someone has put the mask back on, and every name on the list leads back to Excelsior. As the bodies drop and the ratings climb, the survivors have to work out which is more dangerous: the killer hunting them, or the producer who needs the footage.
Told in prose, broadcast episodes, confessionals, chyrons, and comment sections, Mortal Vengeance II: To Reel or Not Too Real? is a Caribbean Gothic slasher and a merciless satire of reality television, where trauma is content, grief is a storyline, and nobody is safe from the edit.
Inside:
A masked killer inspired by Dominican carnival
The Dominican Republic in full: country clubs, convents, Casa de Campo, and a matriarch armed with a jug of Aperol
A “Previously on…” prologue for new viewers and a glossary of Dominicanismos
The survivors of Mortal Vengeance, winner of the Literary Titan Gold Award and the IndieReader Discovery Award, meet the unfinished business of Mortal Vengeance: A Grim Tale.
Content note: graphic violence and gore, and themes of abuse, grooming, suicide, and self-harm. For mature readers.
Mortal Vengeance II: To Reel or Not Too Real?
Mortal Vengeance II takes the blood-soaked legacy of Excelsior Academy and turns it into something as outrageous as it is unsettling: a reality television phenomenon built around the survivors of a horrifying tragedy. Three years after a series of murders shattered their lives, the former students have become the stars of The Real Scholars of Excelsior Academy, a show where personal trauma, celebrity, and manufactured drama collide. But when the sinister Grim Cojuelo resurfaces, the boundaries between entertainment and terror become dangerously blurred. This dark psychological thriller combines murder mystery, biting social satire, and the irresistible messiness of reality television into a sprawling story that knows exactly how to keep its audience watching.
One of the book’s greatest strengths is its wonderfully chaotic ensemble of characters. Alex Herrera, a charming, calculating young man whose past continues to complicate his relationships, remains a particularly fascinating presence. His connection with Melissa Rocha brings romantic tension and emotional vulnerability to a story filled with suspicion and danger. Mónika Torres commands attention with her fierce loyalty and larger-than-life personality, while Lucía Salgado carries the weight of experiences that make her both compelling and deeply sympathetic. Then there’s Doña Silvia, whose formidable personality, maternal instincts, and affection for Aperol Spritz provide some of the book’s most entertaining moments. Even executive producer Shane Harper becomes a fascinating study in ambition, demonstrating just how easily human suffering can become valuable television content.
The novel’s distinctive storytelling format gives it much of its personality. Traditional prose shares the stage with television scripts, confessionals, episode recaps, on-screen captions, and behind-the-scenes footage. Chapter titles and scenes borrow from reality television’s most recognizable catchphrases, creating an ongoing conversation with the pop culture that inspired them. The dialogue moves naturally between English and Spanish, with Dominican slang, humor, and cultural references grounding the extravagant events in a recognizable social world. Santo Domingo feels alive through its personalities, locations, class tensions, and social expectations. The result is a reading experience that frequently resembles watching a wildly unpredictable television series, complete with unforgettable personalities, outrageous exchanges, and carefully timed revelations.
Beneath the spectacle, the novel explores some genuinely disturbing questions about fame, exploitation, accountability, and the lasting consequences of violence. These characters have survived terrible experiences, yet the public’s fascination with their suffering demands that they revisit those experiences for entertainment. The story examines how producers manipulate narratives, how audiences embrace convenient villains, and how public opinion can become its own instrument of cruelty. Religious hypocrisy, institutional corruption, prejudice, and the complicated nature of forgiveness also play significant roles. What makes these themes engaging is the way they’re woven into relationships, confrontations, dark comedy, and escalating suspense. The humor can be gloriously irreverent, sometimes arriving at moments of astonishing tension, which gives the book an unpredictable emotional rhythm.
Mortal Vengeance II is an ambitious and unapologetically theatrical thriller with a sharp understanding of the public’s appetite for scandal. Its blend of outrageous comedy, complicated relationships, psychological unease, and brutal suspense creates a story that moves between laughter and dread with remarkable confidence. The reality television framework gives the author room to examine how people perform versions of themselves while struggling with feelings and experiences that can’t be neatly edited into an episode. Readers who enjoy ensemble mysteries, morally complicated characters, wicked humor, and dramatic storytelling will find plenty to sink their teeth into. Most memorably, the novel leaves readers considering their own fascination with the spectacle unfolding before them. In Mortal Vengeance II, the cameras capture the drama, the masks conceal the danger, and the greatest horror is discovering just how much we’re willing to watch.
Pages: 802 | ASIN: B0HM3358WC
Honesty and Exploitation
Mortal Vengeance: A Grim Tale is an origin story that frames the development of a Dominican folklore figure born of a Jesuit-run Academy’s cruel character- building discipline. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The direct inspiration came from a beta reader I used to work with. She deeply enjoyed Mortal Vengeance, but she pointed out that certain elements felt underdeveloped—particularly the lore surrounding the Grim Cojuelo, the psychological drivers behind key characters, and the extent of Profesora Lourdes’ cruelty. Her critique lingered with me, and she was right. There were emotional and mythological layers I had only hinted at.
I also knew I hadn’t fully examined what pushed Marcos, right from Chapter 1 of the original novel, to declare that “the old hag has to pay.” That line carries weight. I owed readers the institutional and psychological conditions that made such a statement inevitable.
The setting itself is personal. I attended an all-boys Jesuit school for twelve years. While my experiences were not identical to those of my characters, the cadence of the speeches, the moral framing, and the rhetoric of “character formation” delivered by figures like Padre Ángel, Padre Ignacio, and Profesor Malagón are drawn directly from memory. The language of discipline. The idea that suffering builds virtue. The subtle humiliation disguised as moral instruction. That framework became fertile ground for psychological horror. A Grim Tale became a space to explore the Grim Cojuelo’s birth not as a monster, but as the consequence of repression and cruelty.
What is the most challenging aspect of writing a psychological thriller? The most rewarding?
The hardest part is control.
With Mortal Vengeance: A Grim Tale, I was navigating heavy subject matter—grooming, institutional abuse, suicide, and psychological collapse. The challenge was not whether to go dark. The story demanded darkness. The challenge was how to confront it responsibly. There is a thin line between honesty and exploitation.
When addressing suicide, for example, I had to think carefully about what to depict and what to withhold. The aim was to portray the emotional and systemic forces pushing a character toward that edge without turning the narrative into spectacle—or instruction. That balance—showing the consequences of corruption, violence, and humiliation without veering into sensationalism or “torture porn”—was difficult, but essential.
Tonal balance was another challenge. The original Mortal Vengeance functions as a slasher/whodunnit. A Grim Tale is pure psychological horror. There is no mystery engine asking “who did it?” If readers come from the main novel, they already know how this ends. Suspense had to emerge from inevitability. The question becomes not what will happen, but how it becomes unavoidable. Ensuring readers care about the journey rather than the destination was crucial.
Then there are the rules of horror itself. How much do you explain when the Grim Cojuelo appears? Is it supernatural? Psychological? Symbolic? How does Julian interpret what he sees? How does the world respond? Balancing that supernatural-psychological axis without tipping too far in either direction required restraint. Over-explain, and the horror collapses. Under-explain, and coherence dissolves.
The most rewarding aspect is precision.
While I’m not aiming for a Shyamalan-style twist, there is a final reveal—a reframing—that has been quietly telegraphed throughout the novel. Every clue is there for readers willing to pay attention. When they reach that final moment and realize it was always in front of them, that recognition is deeply satisfying.
Psychological horror works best when the reader feels implicated in the discovery. When that happens—when the realization feels earned rather than imposed—that’s the reward.
Obviously, you took great care in describing the settings throughout your story. How do you strike a balance between perfecting the mood in your thriller and developing the plot?
You have to paint a picture. If the reader can’t see it, they won’t feel it. And in psychological horror, feeling is everything.
It’s often said that “an image is worth a thousand words.” I believe that’s true—but the reverse should also hold: “a thousand words must paint a clear image.” Description isn’t decoration—it’s infrastructure. In a psychological thriller, the inner world and the outer world are constantly mirroring each other. The setting isn’t just where things happen; it’s how things are perceived. If a character is unraveling, the environment should feel unstable. If the institution is corrupt, the architecture should feel imposing, suffocating, immaculate in a way that hides rot.
In A Grim Tale, the surroundings—especially Excelsior Academy—had to function as a character. Many readers may not be familiar with the Dominican Republic beyond resort postcards. I wanted the setting to feel lived-in, specific, textured. The marble, the crucifixes, the stained glass, the speeches about virtue—those details aren’t aesthetic indulgence. They establish atmosphere, yes, but they also drive the plot because they shape the characters’ psychology. The institution becomes the pressure cooker.
The key is that mood must serve movement. If a scene doesn’t deepen tension or push a character closer to transformation, it doesn’t belong.
And transformation is crucial. Horror isn’t about the final form—it’s about the process. The unsettling part isn’t the monster fully realized; it’s watching the fracture happen in slow motion. It’s seeing the body, the mind, the belief system crack and reform. If readers don’t feel that breaking point—if they don’t sense the dread building inside the character—then the plot reveal won’t matter.
So the balance comes from intention. Atmosphere isn’t separate from the plot. It is plot. When done correctly, every description tightens the noose a little further.
If it doesn’t, it’s just pretty writing. And pretty writing has no business in horror unless it’s hiding something.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
I’m currently about 80% through the first draft of the sequel to Mortal Vengeance. It’s titled Mortal Vengeance II: To Reel or Not Too Real? — and no, that’s not a typo. The novel continues the slasher framework established in Book 1, but this time it leans harder into satire. It’s slightly less oppressive in tone than A Grim Tale, but not lighter in stakes. This installment examines media, performance, and the blurred line between spectacle and truth. The horror remains — it simply evolves.
At the end of Mortal Vengeance, a character drops a seemingly casual hint that longtime readers will recognize as more significant than it appears. In A Grim Tale, I subtly expand on that thread. Without giving too much away, let’s just say a piece of fruit becomes symbolically important. Returning readers will understand. New readers will soon enough. It’s a genre blend, and yes, it’s a risk. But this series has always interrogated power structures — this time, it asks what happens when violence, trauma, and justice become content.
As for timing, I’m aiming to complete the draft soon, followed by revisions. If all goes according to plan, readers won’t have to wait long, perhaps fall of 2026.
At the same time, I’m developing a children’s series titled IMALIVE. And while that may seem like a sharp contrast, thematically it isn’t.
If Mortal Vengeance explores what happens when institutions silence young people, IMALIVE is about empowering children to believe their voices matter.
The project began as something deeply personal. When my eldest nephew turned eight, he asked me to write him a story as a birthday gift. That request became a larger idea. The core message is simple: imagination is powerful, but agency is transformative. Children can dream, yes — but they can also build, create, and shape their world.
So while one series dissects the consequences of repression, the other celebrates possibility.
They may look different on the surface. At their core, they’re both about power — and who gets to claim it.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Alejandro Torres | Amazon
Mortal Vengeance: A Grim Tale is a queer psychological slasher thriller set in an elite Catholic academy in Santo Domingo, where money, faith, and reputation always come first—and students like Julián Díaz are disposable.
Julián is a scholarship kid in a world of ski trips, private drivers, and last names that open doors. His parents have bet everything on Excelsior Academy, certain that if he keeps his head down and excels, he’ll escape poverty and make their sacrifice worth it. Instead, he becomes a convenient target: a vicious math teacher obsessed with breaking “weak” students, priests more interested in image than souls, and rich classmates who treat him as both mascot and threat. Under that pressure, Julián begins to **dissociate**. When reality becomes unbearable, his mind slips sideways into nightmarish visions of the Grim Cojuelo, a horned figure from Dominican folklore that stalks the school’s halls, churches, and dreams with a scythe and a mirror full of other people’s sins.
Around him, other students are fighting their own battles. Lucía, a razor-sharp debate star, can dismantle any argument but can’t quite untangle her feelings for the boys circling her: Alex, her brilliant, morally outraged debate partner, and Enrique, the charming golden boy whose courtly manners hide something colder underneath. Fernando, a popular athlete with a soft center, is falling for Julián in a place where the wrong kiss could destroy both of them. Behind classroom doors and church altars, girls like Melissa endure “perfect” boyfriends who leave bruises where sweaters and makeup can cover them.
When a Christmas show erupts into a brutal act of dating violence in the school parking lot, the moment is caught on shaky phone cameras and explodes across social media. Overnight, Excelsior’s glossy façade cracks. Parents demand answers, the administration scrambles to control the narrative, and students learn in real time how easily the truth can be edited, weaponized, or buried. In whispered conversations, secret group chats, and late-night plotting sessions, Lucía, Alex, Fernando and the others begin to question whether playing by the school’s rules has ever protected anyone but the powerful.
As the year spirals, Julián’s dissociative episodes fuse with the legend of the Grim Cojuelo until he can no longer tell where his trauma ends and the monster begins. The Cojuelo doesn’t hunt at random; it hunts the people who have built careers, reputations, and fortunes on other people’s pain.
Blending dark humor, queer romance, and slow-burn dread, Mortal Vengeance: A Grim Tale explores class rage, religious hypocrisy, gendered violence, and how institutions teach kids to either disappear… or become something frightening enough that no one can ignore them. When the Grim Cojuelo finally steps out of legend and into the headlines, the question isn’t who the killer is—it’s how many people helped create him.
Mortal Vengeance: A Grim Tale
Mortal Vengeance: A Grim Tale, by Alejandro Torres De la Rocha, is a psychological thriller that works like an origin story: it follows a 17-year-old senior at the Jesuit-run Excelsior Academy, as the school’s cruelty, silence, and “character-building” discipline quietly shape the conditions for the future Grim Cojuelo killings. It’s framed as the “howdunit” prequel to another book in the same universe, tracing how institutional rot and personal guilt turn a Dominican folklore figure, the limping devil reimagined as a hunter, into something inevitable.
I really enjoyed the cinematic writing. The book opens with a staged, almost spoken-word setup, with a narrator and the killer stepping in like voices in a dark theater, and it keeps that heightened, performative feel even in ordinary moments. The school itself is described with a kind of glossy dread: stained glass, marble, crucifixes everywhere, and beauty that feels like a trap. Sometimes the language is intense, almost daring you to look away. It works, especially when it’s tied to sensory detail and not just mood. Other times, it can feel a little crowded with emphasis, like the book underlining its own points. Still, the voice commits. It wants you inside Julián’s head, where guilt is not abstract; it’s a pressure in the chest.
The author’s big choice, and I mean this in a good way, is to make the horror feel system-made. The most frightening scenes are not supernatural. They’re social. A teacher humiliates a student in public, classmates freeze, phones come out, and nobody with power stops it. Then you get a philosophy class where a priest asks, calmly, if it’s ever okay to lie, and suddenly the book is talking about survival, complicity, and the cost of telling the truth in a place that punishes it. That’s where the psychological thriller genre really clicks for me: it’s less about jump scares and more about watching a closed world tighten its rules until someone breaks. If you like school-set dread where the building itself feels like a character, it reminded me at times of the slow-burn pressure and moral rot in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, and the “this place is shaping you” inevitability you get in Stephen King’s novel Carrie, even though the voice and cultural lens here are very much its own.
I’d recommend A Grim Tale to readers who want their thriller to have teeth, especially people interested in stories about institutions, religious power, and how silence gets enforced. One note, it does not tiptoe around heavy material, including trauma and grooming, so you really have to be in the right headspace. But if you’re drawn to psychological thrillers where the scariest thing is watching a system teach people to look away, you’ll appreciate what this book is doing, and how patiently it builds the sense that the monster is being assembled in plain sight.
Pages: 571 | ASIN : B0FPBB3ZDL
I had time. I had anger. And I was bored.
Mortal Vengeance follows a group of wayward teens who come face-to-face with a horrifying reaper-like being while seeking revenge on a cruel teacher. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
It actually started in a very petty way. During my first month of ninth grade, I came home with a D+ in Spanish on my first report card. It was the first time I had ever received a grade like that, and my parents decided I was too distracted. Their solution was simple and brutal: they removed everything from my bedroom except the lightbulbs.
No TV. No Nintendo 64. No dial-up internet.
I had time. I had anger. And I was bored.
That frustration bled directly into the story. Mortal Vengeance opens with Marcos saying, “That old hag is going to pay,” which perfectly captured my headspace at the time. I was steeped in teenage resentment and heavily influenced by the slasher films of the late ’90s—Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer. With nothing else to do at night, writing became the only way to channel that anger somewhere safe.
What began as a rough slasher script was chaotic, but something interesting happened: people wanted more. I showed a few pages to a friend, and suddenly, classmates were demanding new chapters, threatening me if I showed up empty-handed. I didn’t know it then, but writing helped me process emotions I didn’t yet have the tools to understand. Over time, that raw revenge fantasy evolved into something intentional—a story about how small injustices spiral into something monstrous. What started as anger became craft.
Do you find yourself relating to your characters as you write?
Absolutely—but not in a one-to-one way.
In Mortal Vengeance, the boys were modeled after my friends, with some liberties taken. Alex, in particular, began as a partial self-portrait. His emotional intensity, his insecurity, and the way he uses humor or singing as a coping mechanism—that’s very much me.
Beyond that, I relate to my characters the way a parent relates to their children. You create them, but they are not you. They have their own histories and blind spots. My priority is to give them a reason to be flawed and human. Sometimes I’ll lend them one of my own experiences to ground them emotionally, but ultimately, they have to stand on their own.
What is the challenging aspect of writing a thriller? The most rewarding?
The biggest challenge is pacing—especially in a genre where suspension of disbelief is fragile. I love films like Scream, but I’ve always struggled with how quickly logic collapses once a killer is established. Why aren’t they hiding? Why are they splitting up? In Mortal Vengeance, once the Grim Cojuelo appears, the escalation is relentless by design so the characters don’t have time to question the logic.
The most rewarding part is earning the reader’s trust. When readers are willing to come along for the ride—through fear, grief, and chaos—you know the emotional connection is working. I find the “B-Roll” sections of my book especially meaningful because they offer a quiet intimacy. They give readers space to bond with the characters, so when the danger finally comes, it hits much harder.
Can we look forward to more work from you soon? What are you currently working on?
Yes—very much so. And sooner than you think.
Mortal Vengeance throws readers straight into action, but it only hints at how things reached that breaking point. Mortal Vengeance: A Grim Tale explores what came before: the systems, institutions, and personal failures that normalized cruelty long before the first act of revenge. It’s a different kind of horror—less spectacle, more psychological reckoning.
At the center of the prequel is Julián, a character briefly referenced in the main novel, here brought fully into focus. Through his perspective, the story examines how institutional pressure, moral compromise, and silence converge around a single student. Alongside him is Lucía, his closest friend and emotional anchor, whose loyalty is tested as the darkness deepens. Readers also meet younger versions of Marcos, Fernando, Alex, Enrique, Melissa, and Mónika—before identities harden and choices become irreversible.
The two books can be read in either order. Starting with Mortal Vengeance emphasizes mystery and shock; the prequel becomes an excavation. Starting with A Grim Tale emphasizes dread and inevitability; the main novel then lands as a consequence rather than a surprise.
I’m also finishing the first draft of the sequel, Mortal Vengeance II: To Reel or Not Too Real? It’s a major narrative risk and a necessary evolution for the series. If all goes well, readers can expect it toward the end of the year or early next. I’m excited—and a little terrified—which usually means I’m doing something right.
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In the sun-drenched courtyards of a school in Santo Domingo, a group of friends seals an unbreakable promise: “One for all, and all for one.” With the innocence of youth, they swear to protect each other and stay united, no matter what. But life plays by its own rules, and an act of revenge—fueled by jealousy and old wounds—is about to shatter their world.
What starts as a plan to teach a feared teacher a lesson quickly spirals into uncontrollable terror. Unexplained deaths and brutal attacks begin to haunt their circle, while a shadowy figure known only as El Grim Cojuelo seems to claim victims one by one. Guilt eats away at the friends, paranoia takes hold, and loyalties blur, forcing them to face a reality warped by fear.
Trapped in a nightmare with no way out, the survivors are pushed to confront their own secrets—and the deadly consequences of their actions. With time running out and help far away, will they uncover the truth behind the hooded figure hunting them? Or will their childhood promise be the final thing to break, dragging them all into one last, bloody reckoning?
Mortal Vengeance is a dark, psychological thriller that explores the limits of friendship, the fallout of betrayal, and the razor-thin line between justice and madness. Prepare for a gripping journey packed with tension, shocking revelations, and unexpected twists that will keep you turning pages until the very last chilling breath.
Perfect for fans of psychological thrillers and dark dramas with a Caribbean twist.
If you like:
Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Euphoria, Elite —
you’ll love Mortal Vengeance.
Mortal Vengeance
Mortal Vengeance, by Alejandro Torres De la Rocha, is a young adult supernatural thriller that follows a tight-knit but deeply troubled group of teens whose attempt to get revenge on a cruel teacher spirals into something far darker than any of them imagined. What starts as a grim school drama quickly escalates into a chain of betrayals, fear, and ultimately the appearance of a mythic, reaper-like being that shatters their lives. The book blends coming-of-age turmoil with horror and psychological suspense, and the shift from everyday cruelty to supernatural violence comes through sharp and sudden.
I was pulled into the heat and pressure of those classrooms and courtyards. The writing often leans intense, almost cinematic, with scenes described in a way that makes the emotions feel oversized, raw, and volatile. I caught myself thinking, these kids are carrying way more weight than they know how to hold. Marcos’s explosive anger, Mario’s guilt and fragility, Alex’s manipulative charm and insecurities, Melissa’s heartbreak, Enrique’s need to please everyone… every character is drawn with a kind of heightened emotional color. Sometimes it felt melodramatic, but in a way that matched the story’s pulse. The author’s choice to push sensations and metaphors to their limits gives the book a feverish energy, like the world is always one bad decision away from breaking.
What surprised me most was how quickly the story shifts from grounded teen conflict to something mythic and terrifying. One moment we’re dealing with bullying and revenge in a school hallway, and the next we’re staring down the Grim Cojuelo on a moonlit pier. That jump could have felt jarring, but for me, it worked because the emotional stakes were already running so high. The supernatural element feels like an extension of everything boiling inside these characters. Still, I found myself wishing for a few quieter beats where the emotions had room to breathe. When everything is dialed up, it can be hard to sit with the subtler moments. But there’s something gripping about how unafraid the author is to dive into intensity, whether it’s love, jealousy, fear, or guilt.
Mortal Vengeance is a story about how small cruelties grow into big consequences, and how revenge rarely lands where you expect. If you like young adult stories that mix school drama with supernatural horror, and you don’t mind a narrative that swings for big emotions instead of quiet restraint, this will be the perfect book for you. It’s a dramatic, dark, and sometimes chaotic ride, but it is delightfully entertaining.
Pages: 306 | ASIN : B0FDT6JYSQ
