Literacy 2022: Book 6: Mexican Gothic

Book
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Synopsis
Set in the 1950s, young socialite Noemí Taboada is summoned from her home in Mexico City to respond to a desperate letter sent by her recently-married cousin Catalina. She travels to the family home of Catalina’s new husband, an aging gothic mansion next to a silver mine in Hidalgo. There, she’s haunted by increasingly disturbing nightmares as she uncovers secrets about the family’s dark past, and she suspects that Catalina’s illness and apparent mental breakdown might be caused by something more sinister.

Pros

Stylistically fascinating. The prose itself is straightforward language that rarely gets too flowery or poetic, but often gives the sense of poetry via rhythm and repetition. Details are withheld to stretch out intrigue and give passages forward momentum. Words and ideas are introduced as innocuous foreshadowing, and then repeated with increasing frequency as the idea grows more urgent.

Noemí is an outstanding protagonist. The aspects of her personality that would usually be characterized as “flaws” in a less nuanced (or frankly, more misogynistic) story — her impulsiveness, vanity, stubbornness, youthful arrogance, and manipulative streak — are instead acknowledged as essential parts of who she is, and they even become assets. She’s an extremely intelligent and ambitious character who happens to enjoy the kind of life that shallow people also enjoy.

The author deftly presents an extended metaphor for colonialism embedded in a story that explicitly deals with colonialism. Instead of feeling redundant, it feels as if the details of Mexican history pre- and post-Revolution refuse to sit inert as factual history; they’re given more emotional weight and made to feel more present by seeing the manipulation and abuse played out in a more supernatural Gothic horror.

Steadfastly anti-racist and anti-sexist without ever feeling stridently so.

The author’s notes, along with her essays about the history of gothic romances, and the real Mexican town that inspired the setting of the book, are more interesting and valuable than 99% of novels’ after-words tend to be. They show how much thought went into crafting this book.

It doesn’t descend into pastiche, and it isn’t a deconstruction or a re-interpretation of a Gothic Horror or Gothic Romance novel; it is unabashedly and unashamedly a Gothic Horror/Romance novel. All of the standard elements are used to great effect, without feeling like re-tread or parody. Overall, it feels like a novel written by someone who understands the appeal of the format and its tropes, and is able to counteract the genre’s limitations without also losing what makes it appealing in the first place.

Cons

One decision in terms of pacing the book was extremely jarring and killed my enthusiasm for getting back into it for a day. I was loving the build-up and ever-increasing sense of dread for the first half of the book… and then, a scene happened right after the halfway point that I still believe should’ve been left closer to the climax. I understand the reasoning behind it: stretching it out for much longer would’ve made Noemí seem like a simpleton, because things had developed long past the point of hiding or overlooking the sinister. Still, it felt jarringly sudden.

As a result of the above: an entire chapter is just devoted to exposition, with a character explaining everything that had happened before. I wish that this had been stretched out longer, with Noemí discovering these details and more actively piecing them together, instead of having it all spelled out for her.

Verdict
A truly excellent, compelling horror novel that proves genre fiction can be intelligent, and that familiar tropes can be applied to novel settings. Even with my one big reservation about the climax happening too early, I think it sticks the landing. The resolution had the satisfying feeling of checking off all of the ideas and all of the details that had been set up over the first half of the book. As a white American with little knowledge of Mexico beyond a bunch of random, unsorted facts about its history, I’m really looking forward to reading more by Moreno-Garcia.