The first time I heard of La Llorona, I didn’t know her by that name.
I knew her as The Crying Woman.
I was fourteen years old, living in Odessa, Texas, and it was Halloween. A few friends and I were at one of their houses doing what teenage boys did when we were too old to trick-or-treat and too young to do anything interesting: we watched horror movies and pretended we were more mature than we actually were.
The movie that stuck in my memory from that night was Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. And, because the universe has a sense of humor, my friend’s mother walked into the room during exactly the wrong kind of scene for a group of fourteen-year-old boys watching an R-rated slasher movie.
We moaned when she turned it off.
Then she did something far worse.
She killed the lights.
She lit a candle.
And she told us about The Crying Woman.
That was the version I heard first. Not the polished version. Not the version explained in books or articles. This was the kind of story told in a dark room by someone who knew exactly how to scare the hell out of children who thought Jason Voorhees was the peak of terror.
In her version, The Crying Woman wandered in search of her lost children. But the detail that lodged itself in my head was this: she would mistake bad children for her own. If you were cruel, disobedient, or out where you shouldn’t be, she might come for you.
That was bad enough.
But then came the description.
Sometimes she had the face of a horse.
Sometimes she had no face at all.
That was the image that got me. A woman in white, weeping in the darkness, searching for children she could never find, and where her face should have been there was nothing. Not a skull. Not a monster’s grin. Nothing.
A missing face is a special kind of frightening. The mind wants to fill in the blank, and that’s the problem. Whatever you imagine is usually worse than what someone can describe. I forgot a lot of things from being fourteen, probably for the best, but I never completely forgot that image.
I thought I had.
More than forty years later, my wife and I were in Costa Rica, staying in the country outside of Grecia. It was the kind of place that makes you understand why people write bad poetry and then feel no shame about it. Rolling hills lined with coffee trees. A river behind the house. An old barn on the other side. A small pueblo just a few miles away. Mist in the mornings. Darkness that seemed to gather early beneath the trees.
We were supposed to be on vacation.
My wife understood this assignment.
I did not.
At some point during that trip, I saw a mural connected to Día de los Fieles Difuntos, All Souls’ Day. It wasn’t the bright festival image many people associate with Day of the Dead traditions. It felt quieter than that. More reverent. More intimate. Something about it stirred the memory of that candlelit room in Odessa and the story of The Crying Woman.
And then the story began to form.
My wife likes to remind me that while she was doing the sane thing—sitting outside, enjoying Costa Rica, drinking piña coladas, and appreciating the view—her dumbass husband was inside writing about a ghost.
She is not wrong.
But that is how stories sometimes arrive. They don’t always come politely. They don’t wait until you’re home, organized, and sitting at the perfect desk with the perfect cup of coffee. Sometimes they show up when you are supposed to be relaxing. Sometimes they step out of the trees and refuse to leave.
One night, I would have sworn I saw someone walking along the river behind the house. A woman, or something shaped like one, picking her way carefully along the opposite bank. I gestured for my wife to come look. When I turned back, the figure was gone.
Now, I am not saying I saw La Llorona.
I am saying I saw enough.
That rental house, that river, that old barn, and that nearby pueblo became the soil where The River’s Edge took root. The legend did not become the book exactly as I first heard it. My novel is not a strict retelling of La Llorona. It is more of a conversation with the legend. A story inspired by her grief, her horror, her warning, and the way folklore changes depending on who tells it and where it is told.
In The River’s Edge, the legend became something personal. It became tied to family, guilt, betrayal, love, and the terrible things people do when they are broken beyond repair. The woman in my story has a face, a name, and a history. But somewhere beneath her is still the figure I first imagined as a boy: the faceless woman in the dark, crying for children who are gone.
That is what drew me to La Llorona.
Not just the fear.
The sorrow.
The idea that a ghost story can be both warning and wound. That it can frighten you when you are fourteen and then find you again decades later beside a river in Costa Rica.
Some stories fade.
Some wait.
And some, if you are unlucky or blessed enough, follow you home.