You Should Read MEXICAN GOTHIC by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Cozy, oversized sweater required. Fog optional.
According to my husband, it’s impossible to buy books for me because I’ve read everything (not true!). Luckily, the kind booksellers at Books are Awesome in Parker suggested Mexican Gothic when he visited to find me a birthday present. I figured I’d pay it forward with some recommendations of my own.
If you want to read Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, there are a few things you’ll need:
Chilly, overcast weather
A candle or two
Thunderstorms (can substitute with fog and/or mist)
An oversized sweater
Maybe some cigarettes, as props
But don’t worry: If you can’t recreate the atmosphere of High Place, the deteriorating mansion lording over a Mexican mountain town, you will still enjoy Mexican Gothic. The book opens as Noemí Taboada is departing a costume party with Hugo, her man-of-the-moment. She’s a modern 1950s Mexican woman, carefully balancing having a good time with staying in her father’s good graces. According to him, fun should be had “only as a way to obtain a husband” (6). Her father summons her from the party after receiving an unsettling letter from Noemí’s recently married cousin, Catalina. In the letter, Catalina writes incoherently of a house that “stinks with decay, brims with every single evil and cruel sentiment” (7). By the end of the first chapter, Noemí sets off for El Triunfo to rescue her cousin. The stakes are clear and high: Catalina needs Noemí because she has no other family, and Noemí needs to follow her father’s orders so he will let her study anthropology at the National University.
Once she reaches El Triunfo, the pacing slows. Many Goodreads reviews would disagree with me, but Moreno-Garcia makes the right choice here as she drops her story to a simmer. Rushing right into the mystery of High Place would have leap-frogged careful and necessary worldbuilding. The slower pace matches life at High Place, which consists of Catalina’s husband, Virgil; his aunt, Florence; his father, Howard; and his cousin, Francis. Francis is the only one among them who speaks Spanish. The Doyles are British transplants, drawn to the region by its rich silver mines. Like any good Gothic tale, the creepy house and its unfriendly inhabitants represent a more sinister threat. By setting her novel in an actual British mining ghost town, Moreno-Garcia explores how colonialism begets prejudices and fears that taint one generation after another. She doubles down on the theme by characterizing Howard as a white supremacist. When Noemí finds a eugenics journal in his study, she “no longer wonder[s] if Howard Doyle ha[s] a pair of calipers; now she wonder[s] how many he [keeps]” (39).
Howard’s character brought to mind David Grann’s The Lost City of Z, a true account of one of the last Victorian explorers, Percy Fawcett. Just as Howard believes Mexicans are an inferior race, Fawcett also struggled to view indigenous Amazonians as human. Grann writes, “When he first saw an Indian cry, [Fawcett] expressed befuddlement, sure that physiologically Indians had to be stoic. He struggled to reconcile what he observed with everything he had been taught” about white, Western superiority (157). Fawcett eventually “opposed the destruction of indigenous cultures through colonization,” but Howard makes no such progress. When sickness kills most of his indigenous mine workers, Howard heartlessly finds new ones to exploit. [You should read The Lost City of Z, too.]
In Howard’s strange house, Noemí suffers from bad dreams and sleepwalking. She’s rarely allowed to see her cousin and when she does, Catalina speaks of hearing voices. At other times her cousin verges on catatonic. Feeling uneasy in the house, Noemí ventures into the small town near High Place for help. A local doctor offers a second opinion. An herbalist offers remedies and, perhaps more importantly, the truth about tragedies in the Doyle family’s past. By the time Noemí wants to leave, though, it’s too late. The family wants–needs–her to stay for nefarious reasons. If the reasons had been revealed too early n the book, I am not sure I would have bought into them. But because Moreno-Garcia meticulously builds both characters and suspense, I was far too invested in Noemí to abandon her, just as she refuses to abandon her cousin.
Check out the full (and FREE) post at The Readerly Writer.