# Mexican Gothic

Author: Silvia Moreno-Garcia · 2020

1950s Mexico City: socialite and amateur anthropologist Noemí Taboada receives a frantic letter from her cousin — she has married into the English Doyle family and now lives in their fog-shrouded mansion in the mountains. Something is wrong.

## Review

Moreno-Garcia has written the first truly great gothic novel of the 21st century. High Place — the Doyle mansion — is a mine-owner's folly, built on silver and worked by indigenous labor, now crumbling and haunted by something much older than ghosts. The family patriarch Eugene is a eugenicist with an obsessive interest in genetic purity. The novel layers gothic atmosphere, Mexican history, and body horror into something genuinely original.

Noemí is an exceptional protagonist: fashionable, clever, and absolutely refusing to be intimidated by crumbling English grandeur. The eventual revelation of what the house actually contains redefines the entire gothic genre — it draws on Mexican mycology, Aztec mythology, and colonial history in ways no British or American writer could have conceived.

Mexican Gothic won the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel and was named book of the year by over a dozen publications including TIME and NPR. A rare page-turner that is also genuinely literary.

## Why read this

If you read Frankenstein and wondered what Mary Shelley would have written about colonialism and body politics, this is it. Mexican Gothic takes the Victorian gothic formula and infuses it with Mexican history and indigenous mythology. It also has one of the most satisfying endings in recent genre fiction — Noemí's final act is exactly what the story requires.

## Themes

- Colonial horror
- Body horror
- 1950s Mexico
- Gothic atmosphere
- Strong female lead
- Eugenics

## Buy

Kindle (affiliate): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07YK1K1YK?tag=cyberlibrar00-20

Source page: https://www.cyberlibrary.org/en/lists/gothic-fiction/mexican-gothic/

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