Hache Pueyo: Open the Door
HACHE PUEYO who also writes as H. Pueyo, was born in the south of Brazil to Brazilian and Argentinian parents. As a child she lived in Barcelona, Spain and spent time in Argentina before returning to Brazil, where she lives now. She is the winner of an Otherwise Fellowship for her work with gender in speculative fiction.
Pueyo began publishing short SF in 2016 and has published in Clarkesworld, F&SF, Strange Horizons, and many other magazines. Some of her short fiction is collected in A Study in Ugliness & Outras Histórias from Lethe Press (2022). Novella But Not Too Bold was published in February 2025 by Tordotcom.
Excerpt from the interview:
“My novella But Not Too Bold is a very self-contained story; it’s a simple mystery, set within a house. I envisioned more of a fairy tale aspect for it, and fairy tales are short by nature, so it felt like the right format.
“I wanted to write something that was not exactly a retelling, but incorporated some elements of fairy tales that I enjoy. So I went back to my favorite fairy tale when I was a child, which is ‘Bluebeard’: I wanted to make a Bluebeard story. I was inspired by certain elements of it – the keys, the brides – and I started to worldbuild from there.
“‘Bluebeard’ is one of the more horror-inclined fairy tales, so this was definitely something that attracted me, in the past. I really like one aspect of the narrative: there are people who read ‘Bluebeard’ and see a tale of caution against disobedience, but I always thought that is not what the story actually says, because the protagonist doesn’t get punished for it, in the end. The story is not telling her to conform to the situation – her curiosity actually saves her. I always thought this was a really charming part of it, and I love its whole scenario – this castle, this man, the brides, the room.
“In my version, Dália is a worker who enjoys her occupation but feels invisible in it. I like developing this kind of aspect of a character, because working feels a lot like that, especially when you’re working for the wealthy. You can often feel very invisible, like you’re part of the house, or the working space.
“There weren’t many challenges in writing this story – I had a lot of fun with it, and the process was very fast. I thought about the concept, wrote it in a matter of a few days, revised it, then submitted it. I didn’t spend too much time doubting or questioning anything. I just got very excited writing it.
“The story is a lot about either feeling like you’re not seen, or feeling like you’re too seen. And accepting what is different, perhaps. Something I really like about monster stories is the question of, how do we deal with the differences of a monster, which is so different from a human – especially when those difference are part of their nature? A monster not in the sense of a human with monstrous traits, but something so different from us we cannot judge it with human logic. Those are the biggest elements of the story to me.
“I don’t think I can judge if the book works well or not, but I hope I succeeded in the visuals of it, which is something that I really care about for this one story, in particular. I really tried to focus a lot on making the house and the characters feel vivid, so I hope I managed that.
“I care a lot about that, in general – the visual aspect of a story is very important to me. It felt especially important to incorporate that aspect in But Not Too Bold, because the house is such an extravagant place, with a character who lives and stores her precious memories in there for so very long. I really needed to focus on that scenery and what she keeps in it, more than in other stories where you might not need to spend such a long time on describing it.
“The Brazilian version of the book isn’t very different. In terms of the story itself, it’s pretty much the same. But there were many situations in which I had to rework the sentences, mostly to give it all the same vibe, and to keep the feeling consistent throughout, because some things simply don’t work in English as they do in Portuguese. When you’re translating a story, sometimes you need to adapt the wording a little bit – those were the most important tweaks, both to be more truthful to the meaning of the original sentences, and to have a more appropriate cadence in the target language.
“I didn’t consider having someone else do the translation. There’s a practical reason, which is, I could not afford to pay someone else to translate it. But there is also a more personal reason, which is that I enjoy translating. A very fun aspect of translating your own work is figuring out how to adapt your style from one language to the other. It’s not a suspicion of other translators – if I have the chance to be translated into other languages, I’ll be very happy. But I have fun doing it myself, too.
“Some technical terms can be really hard to translate if they don’t a direct translation that already exists. Let’s say there’s a cultural thing in Brazil that we know the name of, but there is no equivalent concept in English – those sorts of things can be very hard to adapt without altering a lot of the actual sentence. I usually go for adding a small explanation instead of requiring a new word. Same thing if I’m translating about food, and I don’t want to add too many new words that the reader will not understand – I want the reader to be able to visualize things easily. So if I put only the names of cultural dishes that a reader from another country is not familiarized with, they’re not going to understand what I’m saying right away. So instead of just saying the word, I might also describe the dish.
“Sometimes I reach a moment in the translation where a sentence is not working out in the target language – which, as I said before, can be fun, but can also be very frustrating. So then you need to rethink: How can I write this sentence if this cultural reference doesn’t work, let’s say, in English? Passive voice is considered a quality in Portuguese, for example. The active voice can be seen as a more simplistic, which is the opposite of how it is in English, where passive language is often criticized. Sometimes you need to rework the order of things from one language to the other. This can take a lot of time.
“I love Latin American fiction, and I love South American horror. There are so many good writers here, some of my favorite being from Argentina and Ecuador. Most of the books I read are in Spanish or Portuguese, so I don’t know necessarily know the translated titles. I enjoy Mónica Ojeda; I read Jawbone last year. I don’t know the title in English, I think maybe Cockfight, which is a collection of short stories that are pretty dark and horror in nature, from María Fernanda Ampuero. I really love Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enríquez. If we define horror more broadly, including dark fiction that is hard to define, there’s Delirium by Laura Restrepo, The Delivery by Margarita García Robayo. There are more, definitely, that I can’t remember right now.
Interview design by Francesca Myman
Read the full interview in the March 2025 issue of Locus.
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