Author Bios
Short Bio (75 words)
Cesar Torres is a queer, nonbinary author who creates speculative speculative fiction for the modern age. Their worlds blend Mesoamerican mythology, queer embodiment, erotic mysticism, and a Borgesian approach to the mysteries of the human condition and the cosmos. Known for Our Lord of the Flowers, 13 Secret Cities, and the cult series How to Kill a Superhero, Cesar’s work places their characters into situations where they interface directly with the Aztec gods, and most importantly, with their own consciousness. Torres' books, art, and podcast illuminate the sacred, uncanny space where transformation becomes truth.
Medium Bio (150 words)
Cesar Torres is a queer, nonbinary author whose work merges the sacred and the uncanny. Drawing from Mesoamerican mythology, queer embodiment, erotic mysticism, and the labyrinthine legacy of Borges and Roberto Bolaño, their stories follow characters who step willingly—or unwillingly—into contact with Aztec gods, cosmic intellects, and the hidden architectures of consciousness.
Torres writes across multiple worlds: Our Lord of the Flowers, a dark queer novel about grief, hoarded houses, and nonbinary gender identity; 13 Secret Cities, a metaphysical thriller that examines the decay of democracy in the United States through a parallel journey into the Aztec underworld; and the cult series How to Kill a Superhero, which reimagines power and desire through a visceral blend of kink, ritual, and supernatural metamorphosis.
Through their fiction and photography, Torres continually explores the thresholds where body, spirit, and story converge—and the radical ways queer people reshape themselves in the process.
Long Bio (Feature / Print)
Cesar Torres is a queer, nonbinary author whose novels blend myth with modernity, where the hardest journey is often the one inward. Their stories draw deeply from Mesoamerican traditions, Aztec myth, queer embodiment, erotic mysticism, and the labyrinthine legacies of writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Roberto Bolaño. In Torres’ universe, characters are not simply protagonists; they are vessels pulled into encounters with Aztec gods, cosmic intelligences, political decay, and the shadowed architectures of their own consciousness.
Their forthcoming novel, Our Lord of the Flowers, explores grief, hoarded houses, and nonbinary gender identity through a psychedelic encounter with the Aztec god of flower Xochipilli. 13 Secret Cities, a metaphysical thriller set in a haunted Chicago, mirrors the unraveling of American democracy with a parallel descent into the Aztec underworld—a journey where ancestry, city, and self become indistinguishable. And their cult series How to Kill a Superhero has earned a devoted readership across queer kink and speculative erotica communities, reimagining power, intimacy, and metamorphosis through the visceral interplay of ritual, costume, and supernatural force.
Across their fiction, photography, and broader creative practice, Torres investigates what happens when the body becomes a portal and when identity is treated not as a fixed point but as a living, shifting cosmology. Their work asks a singular, insistent question:
How do queer people reshape ourselves—spiritually, politically, erotically—when the world insists we remain static?
Torres’ stories offer an answer: we descend, we transform, we return changed. And in the process, we rewrite the myth of who we are allowed to become.
Books & One-Sheets
Our Lord of the Flowers
Our Lord of the Flowers is a dark queer novel about grief, gender, family, and the impossible work of confronting the secrets we inherit. The book follows Sitr Vitrum, an established leatherman in Chicago, who is summoned by his sisters to clean out their late father’s house — a hoarded labyrinth of objects, documents, and memories that refuse to stay silent.
As Vitrum wades deeper into the house, he is overwhelmed not only by the sheer physical hoard, but by the emotional sediment it contains: his father’s obsessions, his family’s wounds, and the versions of himself he has spent a lifetime avoiding. His kink and life partner, Rosario, becomes both companion and catalyst, guiding him through a journey where sex, death, ritual, and gender collide into one another.
Threaded through this descent is the presence of Xochipilli, the Aztec god of art, flowers, queerness, and ecstatic transformation — a deity who does not arrive as metaphor, but as an active force demanding that Vitrium confront the truth of his own becoming.
Our Lord of the Flowers blends myth, kink, gender fluidity, and ancestral echoes into a narrative about what happens when the divine insists on reshaping a life already weighed down by grief. It is a story about cleaning out a house, yes — but more importantly, about cleaning out the self.
Themes: metamorphosis, queer sanctity, Mesoamerican echoes, erotic mysticism, divine femme and divine masc archetypes.
Ideal readers: Fans of Clive Barker, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Roberto Bolaño, Akwaeke Emezi, Poppy Z. Brite, queer gothic and speculative fiction.
More info: ourlordoftheflowers.com
13 Secret Cities
13 Secret Cities is a political horror thriller that follows Clara Montes, a first-generation college student determined to fight for social justice. On her first week at university, Clara joins the Occupy Liberation Front, a radical activist group planning a massive demonstration in Chicago’s Millennium Park. When the peaceful protest erupts into violence, Clara becomes a witness—and unwilling participant—in a catastrophe that alters the course of American history and exposes the country’s accelerating slide toward fascism and anti-immigrant fear.
Shaken and blamed by her family for her “thirst for chaos,” Clara is forbidden from returning to political activism. But the damage has already been done. Clara has awakened something ancient, something hungry. To atone for her transgressions—and to reclaim the parts of herself fractured by trauma—Clara must undertake an impossible journey: a descent into Mictlán, the Aztec realm of the dead.
Guided by visions and called on by the merciless Lords of the Dead, Clara confronts deities who thrive on blood, chaos, and sacrifice. Her path winds through a Tolkienesque underworld of colossal serpent gods, feuding divine brothers, mother goddesses who have transgressed their own kin, and the terrifying enigma of Mictlantecuhtli, the god of death himself.
13 Secret Cities blends political urgency with mythic scale, weaving a story about activism, ancestry, responsibility, and the spiritual cost of living in a country collapsing under its own violence. Readers have praised it as “intense and terrifying,” “unlike anything I’ve ever read,” and “a rare novel that balances real-world horror with the deep mythology of Mesoamerica.”
Themes: political radicalization, ancestral reckoning, descent into the Aztec underworld, generational trauma, and the inner journey.
More info: 13secretcities.com
9 Lords of Night
9 Lords of Night continues the world of 13 Secret Cities, plunging deeper into the Aztec underworld and the unraveling of a fractured America. This time Nestor Buñuel, a trans detective in the New York Police Department takes on the investigation of a brutal ritual murder in Times Square. As he moves closer to finding the killer, he also unleashes encounters with monsters who claim to be the children of Aztec gods of the underworld. In this sequel the stakes are higher, the gods more ruthless, and the borders between life, death and revolt blur entirely.
Themes: trans identity, discrimination and bias inside power structures, Aztec myth in the 21st century, redemption of ancestral trauma
More info: 13secretcities.com
How to Kill a Superhero (Series)
How to Kill a Superhero is a cult queer horror-erotica thriller series from Cesar Torres (writing as Pablo Greene), where the world of costumed hero-myths collides head-on with queer fetish and kink while undergoing an apocalyptic transformation informed by the Aztec gods.
The series follows Roland, a Mexican protagonist who confronts the architecture of power, the mysteries of fetish, and a mystical inheritance that at times threatens to consume him. The books question the superhero archetype itself—its assumptions of goodness, humility, and immortality—and turn those conventions inside out. It is a story that asks: what if the thing we have desired all our lives is the very thing that destroys us?
Rooted in a raw approach to sexuality, body horror, superhero iconography, and the queer experiences of leather and kink communities, the series has earned praise among readers who crave kink, body horror, and radical vulnerability.
Themes: deconstruction of superheroes, metamorphosis, fetish as myth, the monster within, the loneliness of queerness, divinity in disguise.
More info: howtokillasuperhero.net