Mexican Gothic Commentary
“A body. That’s what they all were to them. The bodies of miners in the cemetery, the bodies of women who gave birth to their children, and the bodies of those children who were simply the fresh skin of the snake.”
Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s sixth novel Mexican Gothic is The Haunting of Hill House meets The Last of Us— a spell-binding and surprising story with depth, terror, and charisma. The reading experience is like carefully unwrapping a present, opening each fold one by one, learning more, getting closer to the truth of our haunted setting, until finally and satisfyingly arriving at the delicious center. Moreno-Garcia expertly lures us in through enticing prose and a grounded setting towards a frightening, hungry monster.
Noemí Taboada, a Mexico City socialite, journeys to High Place, a gothic, country mansion inhabited by her cousin, Catalina, and her in-laws in order to investigate a strange illness befalling Catalina. There, Noemí meets Catalina’s menacing husband, Virgil, as well as Virgil’s family, including a grotesque Uncle Howard, who rules High Place with great authority— like a god— despite his debilitating health condition. Noemí must learn how to navigate all the rules of the ancestral estate, while trying to figure out exactly what’s wrong with her cousin. She befriends Francis, Virgil’s cousin, who shows her pictures and illustrations of fungi, including mushrooms that grow around the property. He is the only spot of light in High Place, with Catalina flickering like a flame about to die. Slowly, the influence of the house starts to affect Noemí, so that she understands what is really going on with Catalina. She must devise a plan to save herself, her cousin, and Francis before it’s too late and they are trapped at High Place for eternity.
Like its predecessor The Haunting of Hill House, Mexican Gothic offers a moody atmosphere with scares that induce a sense of unease. The house itself is a character and alive in its own way. You can really feel the darkness surrounding our characters, and the mystery of High Place touches every corner. Unlike The Haunting of Hill House, Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic takes on a more grotesque body horror, which for me was like adding a razor’s edge to an already sharp horror story. There were times I literally had to close the book for a minute or two after reading a gross sentence. But don’t worry, if you don’t like gore and prefer psychological horror, this book is mostly that. The gore is minimal, although surprising.
One motif repeated is the ouroboros— the snake eating itself, forming a circle. It appears all over High Place, a sort of family crest. The cyclical act of devouring looms over the estate and appears in the family and the house itself. Francis throughout the story seems to defeated and hopeless against what he perceives to be the inevitability of High Place’s violence. It’s all a cycle that he is a part of and cannot stop. Noemí, on the other hand, is determined and fierce in her resistance to the house and the cultish will of her host family. If anyone can be Catalina’s knight in shining armor, like the fairy tales she enjoys, it’s Noemí. If anyone can break the snake’s cycle, it’s her.
While beginning the query process for my own fiction, I saw a number of agents specifically mention Mexican Gothic as a benchmark for their appetite. I saw it referenced so many times I finally said, “OKAY! I’ll read it!” And it’s one of my favorite horror books of the last four years. Though dark, the darkness has a misty-day-type feel— almost cozy, while also viscerally frightening.
I vastly prefer this book to Moreno-Garcia’s other book I recently read, Silver Nitrate, which you can read about here.