Ann Davila Cardinal Books in Order

For Puerto Rican supernatural mysteries: Five Midnights → Category Five
For family stories with magic and secrets: The Storyteller's Death → We Need No Wings
For teen horror with romance and sharp humor: Breakup from Hell → You've Awoken Her

Ann Dávila Cardinal grew up in New Jersey and New York City, with childhood summers spent in Puerto Rico. She describes herself as Nuyorican, and that movement between the mainland and the island has shaped much of her fiction. Her books often follow people who feel caught between places, families, cultures, or versions of themselves.

Puerto Rican stories were part of her family life from the start. Cardinal comes from a line of Puerto Rican writers that includes poets Virgilio and José Antonio Dávila and her cousin, novelist Tere Dávila. After her mother died, Cardinal wanted to preserve family stories so her son could know his abuela and the people who came before him.

That impulse led her deeper into fiction.

She began The Storyteller's Death as a short story in an MFA workshop, then returned to it over many years. The finished novel follows a young woman whose family memories become vivid, unsettling visions. It draws on the idea that stories can carry love, history, pain, and secrets all at once.

Cardinal also grew up on horror. She read horror comics and novels whenever she could find them, along with Gothic staples such as Frankenstein and Dracula. When Stephen King began publishing, she read his work too. That early appetite for scary stories stayed with her, but she has said she likes horror that leaves room for hope.

Her first young adult horror novel, Five Midnights, arrived in 2019. Set in Puerto Rico, it pairs a murder investigation with the legend of El Cuco and follows teens dealing with addiction, family history, and danger that may not be human. The book later received an International Latino Book Award and was a finalist for a Bram Stoker Award. Its sequel, Category Five, brings several characters back for another supernatural case in hurricane-ravaged Vieques.

Puerto Rico is central to these books, not just a spooky backdrop.

Cardinal's later work has widened her range while keeping that interest in family, faith, grief, and the strange things people inherit. Breakup from Hell is a Vermont-set YA horror romance about a teenage girl, a secret relationship, and an evil with deep roots in her family. In The Storyteller's Death, she moves into adult fiction and magical realism, following Isla Larsen Sanchez through a family history shaped by love and buried truths. We Need No Wings centers on a grieving woman whose unexplained levitation sends her toward Spain, family history, and an unexpected new chapter.

Her YA novel You've Awoken Her heads to the Hamptons for a summer of disappearances, drownings, strained friendship, and an ancient threat rising from the water. Across age groups and settings, Cardinal tends to give her characters real emotional problems alongside the supernatural ones.

She earned a BA in Latino Studies, an MA in sociology, and an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has also worked in writing education and helped develop a winter writing residency in Puerto Rico.

Cardinal lives in Vermont with her husband. She cycles through all four seasons, needle-felts tiny reading creatures, and has described her home's basement as impressively creepy, which feels fitting for a writer of monsters and ghosts.