Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
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I loved Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s debut novel Signal To Noise when I read it back in 2015: it’s a rich, modern fantasy that blended its rich characters together music, magic, consequences, and family. I’ve been anticipating her latest, Mexican Gothic, initially because of the really phenomenal cover, but also because it’s a straight-up gothic horror about a decaying family and one young woman’s efforts to free her cousin from their grasp.
Set in the 1950s in Mexico, a young socialite named Noemí Taboada gets a letter from her cousin Catalina, who had recently married into a prominent English family, the Doyles, who presided over the silver mines of El Triunfo. The letter is disturbing: Catalina says that her new husband, Virgil, is trying to poison her, that the house is “sick with rot, stinks of decay, brims with every single evil and cruel sentiment,” but most worrisome: the house whispers to her and refuses to let her go.
Noemí’s father thinks that Catalina’s had a mental breakdown, and wanting to avoid a public scandal, dispatches her to the Doyle’s home, High Place, to figure out the situation and bring her home if necessary.
What Noemí finds when she arrives is a cold, gothic house. The Doyles are emotionally distant and strict, and High Place is a structure in decline.
But Catalina says that she wants to stay with her new husband, and Noemí works to figure out the family and what their story is. She’s disturbed by their casual racism and the family’s ancient patriarch, Howard Doyle, and soon begins to experience hallucinations and strange dreams herself.
Moreno-Garcia’s novel is a carefully tuned gothic tale, with elements of Dracula, The Yellow Wallpaper, Rebecca, and Jayne Eyre peaking out from behind the corners. It includes all of the necessary ingredients: a family in decline, a decrepit, gothic mansion, supernatural phenomena, and characters that have to contend with their reality unraveling around them, coupled with a slow burning sense of dread that drives the novel forward.
I also have to call out the house itself: it’s a glorious representation of the family’s decline, and Moreno-Garcia really nails its presence.
“Then, all of a sudden, they were there, emerging into a clearing, and the house seemed to leap out of the mist to greet them with eager arms. It was so odd! It looked absolutely Victorian in construction, with its broken shingles, elaborate ornamentation, and dirty bay windows…
The house loomed over them like a great, quiet gargoyle. It might have been foreboding, evoking images of ghosts and haunted places, if it had not seemed so tired, slats missing from a couple of shutters, the ebony porch groaning as they made their way up the steps to the door, which came complete with a silver knocker shaped like a fist dangling from a circle.
And like all good gothic horror, it’s a book that holds a stark social commentary at its core, examining the colonial attitudes of High Place. The Doyles, Noemí discovers, came to Mexico strip the country of its wealth, much like the Europeans who came before them. But at some point, there was an illness that spread like wildfire throughout the mining town, and the family has fallen further and further with each year. I don’t want to spoil the reveal, but Noemí and Catalina’s arrival are integral to the family’s plans — a desperate hope to resurrect their bloodline and family fortunes, using deeply racist logic to justify their actions.
It’s a deeply gripping story that cuts to the root causes of the racial divide in the Americas, the result of the encounter between two alien cultures, one that sociopathically exploits and dehumanizes the other. Noemí is an exceptionally vivid, powerful character that Moreno-Garcia transplants into dull, decaying surroundings, showing that the real horror is everything she loses through assimilation.
