Book Review~Mexican Gothic” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

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It was a rainy Friday evening when I first picked up Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. I was browsing through a list of recommended gothic horror books with a Latin American twist, craving something moody and mysterious—something that would wrap itself around my imagination like mist over a forgotten graveyard. The moment I read the blurb, I was hooked: a glamorous Mexican socialite heading into the mountains to investigate her cousin’s bizarre letters from a decaying manor? I knew I had stumbled on a story I wouldn’t be able to put down.

Mexican Gothic lures you with the atmosphere from the first chapter. The Mexican background of the 1950s is vivid and sensual and not a mere backdrop, but an active breathing world. Noem Taboada, the main character, is not a heroine of the kind. She is willful, fashionable and completely up-to-date--out of place at a crumbling, mouldering mansion and in her element at cocktail parties. That is precisely why her plunge into the grotesque core of High Place is so compelling. We feel her horrified and rotten vision through her suspicious, sharp-sighted look.

Her father sends Noem to visit her cousin Catalina who has just married and has written to him in an alarming letter of madness, ghosts and some horrific presence in the manor. What occurs is a masterful mix of gothic elements, gothic house, family secrets, ancient curses, but it is told with a freshness and a cultural flavor that marks it as different from Rebecca or The Haunting of Hill House.

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The manor house, High Place, is a character on its own. It is remote, sitting atop the mist-filled mountains, and its walls have a way of talking and its past is soaked in blood. Silvia Moreno-Garcia perfectly creates the feeling of decay, both physical and figurative. It is all marshy, there is a sluggishness to it, a kind of fungal growth that reflects the psychological rot in the Doyle family, into which Noem is drawn into the dark side of their history.

The patriarch of the family, Howard Doyle, is a rotting remnant of a colonial past that believes in eugenics and is burdened with the legacy of generations of dark experiments, which lies at the center of horror. His boy, Virgil is an evil-tempting, intimidating son, and his pale cousin Francis is shy, and provides to Noem a glimpse of weakness in a household where fear and power reign.

The style is very graphic, even hypnotic. Moreno-Garcia spins the words like a magic spell and draws you into the dream to the reality where you cannot feel or touch anything and all is disturbing. The thing that impressed me the most, though, was that the novel did not simply focus on supernatural fright. The true nightmare is in control, how women are shut down, how traditions decay under the banner of nobility, how colonial ideologies are unwilling to perish. All this is perfectly symbolized by the fungus which is spreading in the house. It is something that lives, all right, but it is also a concept, a heritage that follows and eats.

With further reading, my curiosity changed to obsession. The middle chapters have a crawling, nightmare-like pace to them and at some point I was breathing faster and harder, heart pounding more akin to the kind of dread Moreno-Garcia creates page after page. You are with Noem in High Place sharing her feelings, doubting reality, doubting what is real and what is illusion.

The thing is that the novel is memorable because it inverts the damsel in distress trope. Noem is not an inert object awaiting salvation. She is intelligent, creative, and an overly independent person. She doubts everything even at the expense of her safety. And that is why the climax is that sweet: seeing her gaining control, resisting the ugly heritage of the Doyles and deciding on her fate.

As I closed the book with a sigh of relief at last turning the last page I settled back. I was as though I had come out of a dream--or nightmare. Mexican Gothic had provided all that I wanted and much more. It was spooky, not in the old-fashioned way, however. It bothered me in a way that has remained bothersome to me ever since, concerning history, power, biology, and how the past is literally stagnant unless addressed, and confronted.

I finished the book considering the burden of generational trauma, particularly in families who appear to be flawless on the outside, but are severely dysfunctional on the inside. It also put me to think how colonial ideas may remain both in culture and in minds poisoning generations like a virus. Body horror by Moreno-Garcia is genius in this situation it is not anything shocking it is visceral embodiment of systems of oppression.

Should I recommend this book? Absolutely. However, not to everybody. It is not an action-packed and fast-moving thriller. It burns slowly, a candle-lit journey into horror that you can not help listening to. It takes patience to wander in the fungus and moss-overgrown corridors and delusions of fungi. However, once you give in to its creepy beat, Mexican Gothic makes it well worth your while to read, as it will stay in your mind long after you are done with it.

Reading Mexican Gothic also brought me back to what I loved about gothic horror in the first place not only because of its haunted houses and family secrets but also because of the metaphoric way in which it can be used to uncover hidden truths about our world. And under the command of such a strong person like Silvia Moreno-Garcia, this genre becomes live, beating and more powerful than ever.

When you need a book that is like taking a sip of bitter wine in a velvet dress, meandering through corridors that reek of wet soil and secrets, Mexican Gothic is what you want. It is ghostly, beautiful, and haunting, a heady mix of traditional horror and women standing their ground.

And now, I can hardly wait to read more of the Silvia Moreno-Garcia. As this is her take on gothic horror, then I can only guess how amazingly she is going to take on other genres. She does not only write stories, she casts spells. And The Mexican Gothic? It is one I am not out of.

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The last three images was gotten from web:

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