Hache Pueyo is joining us today to talk about her novel, But Not Too Bold. Here’s the publisher’s description:
The Shape of Water meets Mexican Gothic in this sapphic monster romance novella wrapped in gothic fantasy trappings
The old keeper of the keys is dead, and the creature who ate her is the volatile Lady of the Capricious House―Anatema, an enormous humanoid spider with a taste for laudanum and human brides.
Dália, the old keeper’s protégée, must take up her duties, locking and unlocking the little drawers in which Anatema keeps her memories. And if she can unravel the crime that led to her predecessor’s death, Dália might just be able to survive long enough to grow into her new role.
But there’s a gaping hole in Dália’s plan that she refuses to see: Anatema cannot resist a beautiful woman, and she eventually devours every single bride that crosses her path.
What’s Hache’s favorite bit?
Simply put: a house.
Not any house, of course, but the main setting of this story, in which almost all of the plot takes place, a wonder (or monstrosity) of architecture designed by a fictional Catalan architect of the Modernisme variety for a fictional wealthy owner. It’s a house, but it’s also a hiding place. And this is where the fun started, in its furnishing and details, in this construction that had to take so much space.
The Capricious House (or Casa Caprichosa, as in it’s original Brazilian Portuguese version)turned intoa neo-Gothic palazzo with Germanic inspirations, ornate with beautiful tiles and macabre gargoyles, inspired by places like Puig i Cadafalch’s Casa Amatller, his demolished Casa Trinxet and Gaudí’s Casa Vicens. It’s surrounded by a field of poppies, and the flowers grow inexplicably and endlessly, used for the production of tea, laudanum, or gifted as bouquets. It has packs of Dalmatians trained to hunt and three tiers of employees that live in the lower floors, divided by color-coded activities. Its two kitchens are always busy, either to feed its workers or its mistress, who is permanently hidden in the attic and upper floor.
Dishes of extravagant food, real or imagined, are delivered through its wrought iron elevator, as Madam Anatema never leaves her burrow of folding screens and spider webs, and tarantulas of all kinds roam the halls, used as pets or eaten like delicacies. Creating variations of real recipes was as exciting as furnishing rooms with lavish Art Nouveau decoration, and some of the most outlandish aspects, like a particularly magical dessert, are based on real things—namely, the use of giant Amazon water lilies in northern Brazil, as well as other non-conventional edible plants.
The world of the Capricious House was my favorite part of writing BUT NOT TOO BOLD, and it felt like the best kind of self-indulgence. I lived many years of my childhood as an immigrant in Barcelona, and Catalan architecture left a lasting impact on me; I love describing food and trinkets; and I absolutely adore spiders (in this case, the cover may not prepare you for the quantity of spiders you will find). Mixing everything became this house, and it’s safe to say the story wouldn’t exist without it.
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BIO:
Hache Pueyo is the Argentine-Brazilian writer and translator of But Not Too Bold (Tordotcom, 2025). She won an Otherwise Fellowship for her work with gender in speculative fiction, and her work has appeared as H. Pueyo in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, among others.
