October 1, 2022
Mexican Gothic is a sublime work of post-colonial gothic. It’s a story that unsettled me so effectively I found myself, on more than one occasion, helplessly desperate to claw my way out of my reading experience, to put a merciful distance between me and the words and the bleak and stifling horror that lies within. At the same time, however, I couldn’t. The more I read, the more I wanted to read. I felt utterly, helplessly compelled.
In Mexican Gothic, Moreno-Garcia uses the familiar trappings of the Gothic genre—a house atop the hill, enshrouded in a brew of dark mist; a gently malevolent proprietor, beautiful but cold as a moonbeam; an entrapped woman, once uncontainable and full of life, growing frail as the shaft of a feather; and a looming dread, threatening to press everyone inside softly and heavily to the ground. The author, however, makes ample room to address and interrogate where the genre’s limitations exist and the forces that inform them, showing the reader something viciously, vividly new.
The project of the novel underneath the poignant horror is a deliberate indictment of racism, colonization, class disparity, and abuse in all its forms. It’s a reckoning with history, and a return to the past, like following a path of blood or the pulse of a still-aching wound—and it makes for a sharp and vital undercurrent to the eerie and haunting atmosphere. Through her lucid and eerily sure-footed prose, Moreno-Garcia sinks the reader into a shadow-steeped, fog-drenched world where reality is turned slippery and slick and the past drags on like a nightmare. Her body horror is splashed out in blunt and nauseous detail, and the steady accretion of apprehension is so oppressively potent you can almost feel the watchful, thrumming presence of High Place clawing at your back.
Speaking of, the novel’s setting—High Place—functions as a character in and of itself, so present and embodied and awakened. It’s the home of the eugenics-obsessed Doyle family whose pockets were made rich with gold the labor of Indigenous workers had put there. But the house is a perverse imitation of a home: it is a place where silence yawns like a chasm, cavernous and echoing; a place that is both corrupt and corrupting, a snake devouring its own tail. It's a place consumed by a wrongness so old and so pervasive that it never truly leaves such places. It is embedded in the mold-covered wallpaper, wedged into the supports of the house, needled into every woundlike crevice, humming darkly inside the walls and in the places no one ever ventures.
This wrongness, the novel is careful to illustrate, is as deep-running as roots, spreading through generations like a species of fungus: the result of an endless, unbroken history of brown dreams wrecked and swallowed and devoured for the sake of white people’s wellness, of brown bodies poked and prodded for the innumerable ways in which they could be serviceably consumed, a relentless and hideous abrasion of dignity that is not unfamiliar to many people of color everywhere.
Therein lies the novel's most unforgettable accomplishment: the horror in Mexican Gothic is so poignant, so stark and oppressively bleak precisely because it's recognizable. It’s racism and xenophobia and white supremacy recast as eldritch nastiness. Strip it of that—of the corrupting illness and the dreams choked with dreadful desire and all the things that lurk deep inside, sleepless and eager to have a go—and it’s real, and it’s vicious and brutally jolting in its sheer, inexorable reality.
Horror, as a genre, offers a dim sanctuary: we read horror to escape, to let ourselves feel and exist through the shock and distress and crawling dread, secure in the knowledge that none of it is real, and that we are firmly in control. But there is no relief in waking up from this novel—this is the thing that exists outside your door, darkly reflective on the page, and you can’t escape it.
One other triumphant aspect of this novel that I want to talk about lies with its protagonist, Noemí Taboada.
The protagonist of Mexican Gothicc is no one’s damsel in distress, swooning prettily on a lover’s arm. Noemí Taboada is a bold, capable, and carelessly curious socialite hunting fun and living life at full blast in 1950s Mexico. She is a scintillating study in multidimensionally: Noemí can be as sweet as candied almonds, and she can be as sharp and tart as a lemon, and her doggedness in the pursuit of life’s capricious pleasures—fine gowns, fine parties, and fine cigarettes—are matched only by her determination to earn a Master’s degree in anthropology. Noemí has a satisfying vehemence to her, edged with bitter resentment against a world that wants to punish her for her ambition, for the sin of hunger. Because a hungry woman is dangerous: she is undutiful and unpliable and does not accept nor submit to intimidation, humiliation, or exotification. A hungry woman is entirely her own person, answerable to herself, and therefore she is considered “a bitch, and a bitch can hardly do anything: all avenues are closed to her.”
I liked Noemí so much, and rooted for her so feverishly. She is a refreshing protagonist, and a colossally vital one. The author renders her voice as permeable as sand, keeping us pressed close to her mind, feeling the raw edges of her anxiety and the whip-crack urgency of her desperation with a piercing keenness. As a result, the gaslighting and the tender manipulation threaded through the quiet lines of Mexican Gothic—and which Noemí is subject to—become as dreadfully effective as the body horror. The Doyle’s persecution of Noemí—deliberate, unyielding, and sadistic—sought to wear at her sanity like water against stone, to shrink her down to a pliable and docile facsimile of her cousin, and it was so utterly convincing I found myself sweating a little, squirming in my seat in profound discomfort. Even worse, I felt my own certainties unraveling, right alongside Noemí’s. It was profoundly chilling, and I was chilled by it, but I was also impressed. Impressed at the author’s inerrant ability to twist her reader’s feelings like a bit of ribbon, to entrap and tantalize and wrong-foot, to show you all the workings and still make you fall headlong into the shiny trap of it.
At the end, I resurfaced from Mexican Gothic feeling both exhilarated and exhausted with words, sighing with the horrified relief of a hundred pages' worth of held breath finally expelled, but unable to shake off this novel for days afterwards. This is what I've come to recognize as the gorgeous marker of a well-told story: wonderful and terrible and, like a childhood memory, impossible to escape. Highly recommended!
In Mexican Gothic, Moreno-Garcia uses the familiar trappings of the Gothic genre—a house atop the hill, enshrouded in a brew of dark mist; a gently malevolent proprietor, beautiful but cold as a moonbeam; an entrapped woman, once uncontainable and full of life, growing frail as the shaft of a feather; and a looming dread, threatening to press everyone inside softly and heavily to the ground. The author, however, makes ample room to address and interrogate where the genre’s limitations exist and the forces that inform them, showing the reader something viciously, vividly new.
The project of the novel underneath the poignant horror is a deliberate indictment of racism, colonization, class disparity, and abuse in all its forms. It’s a reckoning with history, and a return to the past, like following a path of blood or the pulse of a still-aching wound—and it makes for a sharp and vital undercurrent to the eerie and haunting atmosphere. Through her lucid and eerily sure-footed prose, Moreno-Garcia sinks the reader into a shadow-steeped, fog-drenched world where reality is turned slippery and slick and the past drags on like a nightmare. Her body horror is splashed out in blunt and nauseous detail, and the steady accretion of apprehension is so oppressively potent you can almost feel the watchful, thrumming presence of High Place clawing at your back.
“It wasn’t made for love, the house.”
“Any place is made for love,” she protested.
“Not this place and not us. You look back two, three generations, as far as you can. You won’t find love. We are incapable of such a thing.”
Speaking of, the novel’s setting—High Place—functions as a character in and of itself, so present and embodied and awakened. It’s the home of the eugenics-obsessed Doyle family whose pockets were made rich with gold the labor of Indigenous workers had put there. But the house is a perverse imitation of a home: it is a place where silence yawns like a chasm, cavernous and echoing; a place that is both corrupt and corrupting, a snake devouring its own tail. It's a place consumed by a wrongness so old and so pervasive that it never truly leaves such places. It is embedded in the mold-covered wallpaper, wedged into the supports of the house, needled into every woundlike crevice, humming darkly inside the walls and in the places no one ever ventures.
This wrongness, the novel is careful to illustrate, is as deep-running as roots, spreading through generations like a species of fungus: the result of an endless, unbroken history of brown dreams wrecked and swallowed and devoured for the sake of white people’s wellness, of brown bodies poked and prodded for the innumerable ways in which they could be serviceably consumed, a relentless and hideous abrasion of dignity that is not unfamiliar to many people of color everywhere.
Therein lies the novel's most unforgettable accomplishment: the horror in Mexican Gothic is so poignant, so stark and oppressively bleak precisely because it's recognizable. It’s racism and xenophobia and white supremacy recast as eldritch nastiness. Strip it of that—of the corrupting illness and the dreams choked with dreadful desire and all the things that lurk deep inside, sleepless and eager to have a go—and it’s real, and it’s vicious and brutally jolting in its sheer, inexorable reality.
Horror, as a genre, offers a dim sanctuary: we read horror to escape, to let ourselves feel and exist through the shock and distress and crawling dread, secure in the knowledge that none of it is real, and that we are firmly in control. But there is no relief in waking up from this novel—this is the thing that exists outside your door, darkly reflective on the page, and you can’t escape it.
“There’re heavy places. Places where the air itself is heavy because an evil weighs it down. Sometimes it’s a death, could be it’s something else, but the bad air, it’ll get into your body and it’ll nestle there and weigh you down. That’s what’s wrong with the Doyles of High Place.”
One other triumphant aspect of this novel that I want to talk about lies with its protagonist, Noemí Taboada.
The protagonist of Mexican Gothicc is no one’s damsel in distress, swooning prettily on a lover’s arm. Noemí Taboada is a bold, capable, and carelessly curious socialite hunting fun and living life at full blast in 1950s Mexico. She is a scintillating study in multidimensionally: Noemí can be as sweet as candied almonds, and she can be as sharp and tart as a lemon, and her doggedness in the pursuit of life’s capricious pleasures—fine gowns, fine parties, and fine cigarettes—are matched only by her determination to earn a Master’s degree in anthropology. Noemí has a satisfying vehemence to her, edged with bitter resentment against a world that wants to punish her for her ambition, for the sin of hunger. Because a hungry woman is dangerous: she is undutiful and unpliable and does not accept nor submit to intimidation, humiliation, or exotification. A hungry woman is entirely her own person, answerable to herself, and therefore she is considered “a bitch, and a bitch can hardly do anything: all avenues are closed to her.”
I liked Noemí so much, and rooted for her so feverishly. She is a refreshing protagonist, and a colossally vital one. The author renders her voice as permeable as sand, keeping us pressed close to her mind, feeling the raw edges of her anxiety and the whip-crack urgency of her desperation with a piercing keenness. As a result, the gaslighting and the tender manipulation threaded through the quiet lines of Mexican Gothic—and which Noemí is subject to—become as dreadfully effective as the body horror. The Doyle’s persecution of Noemí—deliberate, unyielding, and sadistic—sought to wear at her sanity like water against stone, to shrink her down to a pliable and docile facsimile of her cousin, and it was so utterly convincing I found myself sweating a little, squirming in my seat in profound discomfort. Even worse, I felt my own certainties unraveling, right alongside Noemí’s. It was profoundly chilling, and I was chilled by it, but I was also impressed. Impressed at the author’s inerrant ability to twist her reader’s feelings like a bit of ribbon, to entrap and tantalize and wrong-foot, to show you all the workings and still make you fall headlong into the shiny trap of it.
At the end, I resurfaced from Mexican Gothic feeling both exhilarated and exhausted with words, sighing with the horrified relief of a hundred pages' worth of held breath finally expelled, but unable to shake off this novel for days afterwards. This is what I've come to recognize as the gorgeous marker of a well-told story: wonderful and terrible and, like a childhood memory, impossible to escape. Highly recommended!
