Overview

Who killed Eliza Vazquez? As a Mexican-American family moves from Boyle Heights, Los Angeles into the sleepy suburban town of Harper, they are met with suspicion. Who is the so-called ""Harper Murderer?"" Is it Michael Martinez, a construction supervisor with a quick temper and an anti-immigrant bias, Robert Parsons, a known racist with a number of secrets kept from his family and community, or Kenton Weaver, a disgraced former teacher who is haunted by the ghost of one of his former students? Grievances both new and old emerge as members of the Martinez family, the Parsons family, and Weaver become tangled in a disastrous chain of events before a shocking conclusion. ""Weaving complex characters, supernatural elements, murder, racism, and suburban melodrama, The Enemy Sleeps is a rousing, ghastly debut novel."" -Pedro Iniguez, Bram Stoker Award winner and author of Fever Dreams of a Parasite ""Who knew the East San Gabriel Valley needed a noir story to excavate its darkness, humanity and complexity? In his debut novel, The Enemy Sleeps, David A. Romero explores how the ones closest to us may be the people we need to fear the most."" -Naomi Hirahara, the Mary Higgins Clark Award-winning author of Clark and Division and Evergreen ""The Enemy Sleeps is a searing blast of genuine, straight-shooting prose from a writer whose fearless pen stakes its claim in L.A.'s underground and scrawls truth across the face of this country's tired suburban pop melodramas. From the same tierra that produced hard-hitting storytellers like John Rechy, Luis J. Rodriguez, Fante, and Bukowski."" -Tim Z. Hernandez, author of They Call You Back: A Lost History, A Search, A Memoir

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Reviews

""This surprising debut novel by spoken word artist, poet, editor, and publisher, David A. Romero, is a complex layered unfolding of interwoven portraits presenting a slice of life in the USA today. Speaking to class, culture, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, morality, friendship y famila, power, and the power of the dead, Romero does to the suburbs of Southern California what Sherwood Anderson did to Winesburg, Ohio. Nothing is as it seems. To reduce The Enemy Sleeps to a psychological thriller would be an injustice to its many nuances. Simply haunting."" -Lorna Dee Cervantes, author of Emplumada, winner of the American Book Award and From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger, winner of the Latino Literature Prize and the Paterson Poetry Prize ""Like a Chicanx American Psycho for the Trump era, The Enemy Sleeps undertakes a disturbing but page-turning rumination on the sociopathies of whiteness and settler colonialism at the core of all urban development; from the Spanish missions to the suburban tract housing and mini-mansions that ring the outskirts of LA. Known for his slam poetry, Romero brings the music and weight of his words to the whodunnit form, skillfully guiding his storytelling so that in the end we're all forced to disrupt the violence we may not have caused, but which we all inherit just by living our lives on stolen lands."" -Marisol Cortez, author of Luz at Midnight (FlowerSong Press, 2020), Winner of the 2021 Sergio Troncoso Award for Best First Book of Fiction, and The Bird Church (Finishing Line Press, 2025) ""David A. Romero's The Enemy Sleeps is a haunting, lyrical, and powerfully layered novel that confronts the myths of progress, community, and the American dream. With razor-sharp prose and cinematic detail, Romero renders a California suburb where gentrification collides with ghosts of the past-both literal and figurative. The Enemy Sleeps is a vital and beautifully unsettling portrait of a place that could be anywhere-and of people you'll never forget."" -Claudia D. Hernández-Warwas, author of If I Lose My Mind (FlowerSong Press, 2025) ""David A. Romero brings lyrical depth and haunting insight in his debut novel, The Enemy Sleeps. His characters breathe, hurt, and hope on the page. A breakthrough achievement by one of our contemporary poets crossing genres with brilliance."" -Edward Vidaurre, author of El Viejo (El Martillo Press, 2025) and publisher of FlowerSong Press ""Romero's mesmerizing debut is a terrific, well-paced read, with a gritty realism reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy, that will leave you uncomfortable as you delve into the dark secrets of a quiet town rocked by racial tensions and murders."" -Natalie Sierra, 3rd Poet Laureate of Pomona, author of the novels Charlie Forever and Ever and Beyond the Grace of God

Author Information

David A. Romero is a Mexican-American spoken word artist from Diamond Bar, CA. He is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of El Martillo Press. Romero is the author of My Name Is Romero (FlowerSong Press, 2020) and Diamond Bars 2 (Moon Tide Press, 2024). Romero has received honorariums from nearly a hundred colleges and universities in thirty-four different states in the USA and has also performed live in Mexico, Italy, and France. His poem, ""You Were Born a Tree"" was sent to the Moon by NASA in 2025 as part of the Lunar Codex. Romero's work has been published in literary magazines and anthologies in the United States, Mexico, England, Cuba, Scotland, Canada, and Hungary. Romero has opened for Latin Grammy winning bands Ozomatli and La Santa Cecilia. Romero's work has been published in anthologies alongside poets laureate Joy Harjo, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Luis J. Rodriguez, Jack Hirschman, and Tongo Eisen-Martin. Romero has won the Uptown Slam at the historic Green Mill in Chicago; the birthplace of slam poetry. Romero's poetry deals with family, identity, social justice issues, and Latine culture. Art Carrillo is a photorealist painter from Los Angeles. He received his bachelor's degree in graphic design from the Art Institute of California-Hollywood in 2011. Art's fire for painting reignited while in school and he has never looked back. He focused on painting instead of graphic design and has been exhibiting since 2012. Art paints about everything. ""Sticking to one subject is boring. There is just so much to paint about. I speak with my paintings and there is a lot to say."" Art paints about everything from burritos and Mexican piggy banks to Mexican American ICE agents manhandling people from Mexican American communities. ""I hope to give people strength and courage through my artwork."" He's worked as a lead scenic backdrop artist and lead artist assistant for many professional artists. The most recent major project was lead assistant to Curtis Stokes on a 10x100 foot canvas mural that was shipped to Florida in May of 2025. He was also lead assistant to Chicana artist Margaret Garcia on a mural paying homage to the late Gloria Molina in August of 2024. In 2023 a short documentary, The Art of Discipline, was made focusing on his journey as an artist. Currently, Art paints almost every day and spends time at the Homeboy Art Academy where he hopes to be an inspiration for troubled youth. He enjoys facilitating painting workshops for various nonprofits in the Los Angeles area. You can learn more about the artist at artcart9.com. Marisol Cortez is a self-described mentally-intense, mixed-blood Xicana weirdo rooted in San Antonio. Cortez is currently the Executive Editor of Deceleration, an online journal of environmental justice thought and praxis for the South Texas borderlands. In 2020 she published her debut novel Luz at Midnight (FlowerSong Press 2020), which won the Texas Institute of Letter's 2021 Sergio Troncoso Award for First Book of Fiction and the 2022 Creative Book prize from the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. She's also the author of I Call on the Earth (Double Drop Press 2019), a chapbook of documentary poetry, and ""Making Displacement Visible: A Case Study Analysis of the 'Mission Trail of Tears, '"" which together bear witness to the forced removal of Mission Trails Mobile Home Community. Other poems and prose have appeared in Mutha Magazine, About Place Journal, Orion, Vice Canada, Caigibi, Metafore Magazine, Outsider Poetry, Voices de la Luna, and La Voz de Esperanza, among other anthologies and journals. The Bird Church (Finishing Line Press, 2025) is her latest collection.

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