Mexican Gothic

Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Completed 3/16/2021, Reviewed 3/17/2021
4 stars

This was a really good, twisted variation on the haunted house trope.  It’s Gothic horror set in Mexico on land owned by a British family that used to employ the locals to work under terrible conditions in their silver mine.  It’s smart, sassy, and weird with themes of racism, colonialism, and eugenics.  My only complaint with it is that it has very little Mexican culture in it.  I thought it would have had more based on the title.  But I really enjoyed it, keeping me pretty creeped out through the most of it.  It’s just been nominated for a Nebula Award and was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award, both for 2020.

Noemi is a sassy, headstrong young woman from Mexico City in the 1950s.  Her father receives a strange letter from her cousin Catalina who has just been married to an Englishman named Virgil Doyle and lives in an isolated town far from the city.  Her father sends her to check up on Catalina.  She goes, finding a Gothic mansion on the outskirts of a small village on property that was once a thriving silver mine.  There we find many tropes of the haunted house story, the sickly elderly patriarch, the handsome but scary Virgil, his controlling aunt Florence, and his sympathetic cousin Francis.  Catalina has been confined to her quarters, diagnosed with tuberculosis by the family doctor, and having visions of ghosts coming after her.   The longer she stays, the more she finds out about the ghosts, the family with whom she butts heads, and the strange power of the house.  

The plot is very character driven, particularly in the beginning.  We learn that Noemi is very strong-willed, clashing often with her father, and inevitably in the very Victorian British family that Catalina married into.  Noemi is a great character and the progression of her from doubter to believer is smoothly done.  Florence, Virgil, and the Doyle patriarch are all very classic Gothic horror characters.  They are well crafted and could have come out of The Turn of the Screw.  What makes them stand out is the bizarre way the house is haunted.  No spoilers here, but I thought it was really believable.  

The prose is gorgeous and the dialogue very believable.  It is very much like the last book of hers I read, Gods of Jade and Shadow, with beautiful writing and a strong female protagonist.  The only aspect of the book that bothered me was that there weren’t many Mexican cultural references.  I would have like to have seen more about the clash of cultures between the local population and the English landowners.  Basically it’s a Victorian story located in Mexico.  Sure, there are a lot of references to eugenics, racism, and sexism, but I would have liked more things specific to Mexico.  Even the village near the Doyle’s mansion could have been any village in a European horror story.  

I give this book four stars out of five.  It really is a terrific horror story with sprinklings of Lovecraftian weirdness.  The reveal of the weirdness is like WTF, but made sense in its own internal logic.  Some reviews I’ve seen have found it hard to buy but, having seen this once (and only once) before, I needed little suspension of disbelief.  Moreno-Garcia can write a terrific, tight story and I think I’ll keep reading her in the future.