Book Review - Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Mexican Gothic
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Published by: Del Rey
Publication Date: June 30th, 2020
Format: Hardcover, 320 Pages
Rating: ★★★
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Noemà Taboada's is the life of the party. A wealthy socialite, she loves her modern life and all the men she's stringing along. With her red lipstick firmly affixed she feels like she could tackle anything the world can throw at her. Everything changes when she gets a letter from her cousin Catalina. Catalina is recently married and is convinced that her husband is trying to kill her. Noemà and her father worry that the once wealthy Virgil Doyle only married Catalina for her money and is now going to get rid of an inconvenient wife. Therefore it is up to Noemà to suss out the situation. She packs her bags and heads to High Place. The home is high in the mountains and shrouded by mist. It feels as if she's stepped back in time to a forgotten world where they can't even rely on the electricity and instead live by candlelight. The household consists of four Doyles and Catalina. There is Catalina's husband Virgil, and his father Howard, and Howard's first cousin Florence, and her son Francis. Florence rules the house with an iron first, but Howard is the power behind the throne. But the one thing they all seem agreed on is that Noemà should be allowed to see her cousin as little as possible. They hope they can dissuade her and she'll leave them alone. They obviously don't know NoemÃ. When Noemà can finally speak to Catalina her cousin begs her to seek out a healer, Marta Duval, in the small village of El Triunfo. Catalina says that despite what the family physician says, this medicine is the only thing that can help her. It helps her right into a seizure and Noemà is banned from seeing her cousin. But not that that concerns her too much, as she's started to have ghostly dreams and is sleepwalking. She's befriended Francis and along with information she has dug up it all points to the Doyles being dangerous. She decides she must leave. She can return home, get her father, and return for Catalina. Only the Doyles say she is not allowed to leave. She is to stay. She is to marry Francis. She is going to be one of them now.
The first, and in my mind, most important aspect of a good Gothic novel is location. If you get the location right it's hard to mess up the rest. Mexican Gothic nailed the location. High Place has oodles of Gothic atmosphere. There is this wonderful Crimson Peak vibe that just engulfed me and made me want to stay. I could picture every nook and cranny of that forbidding and compelling house and felt like I was there. Much like Daphne Du Maurier, Silvia Moreno-Garcia has created a memorable place and therefore Mexican Gothic is one of those rare occasions when I don't throw up my arms in protest when comparisons are made to my favorite Cornwall obsessed author. And yet... For once the location just wasn't enough... For me I think Mexican Gothic suffered from too much hype. Summer of 2020 it was THE BOOK everyone was talking about and recommending. Every online book club was reading it and it was flying off the shelves. Perhaps this was just because we hit the book club phase of Covid? I've been in a book club for years so I didn't experience this phase of the pandemic. Because while I enjoyed the book I didn't love it. But who knows, this could change, much like my opinion of Crimson Peak. I did not like that movie at first and learned to appreciate it in time once I got over what I expected it to be and accepted it for what it was; a Gothic love story, not Gothic horror. This here also has the love story elements and the horror elements, but oddly, despite the Gothic trappings, I felt this adhered more to magical realism. I mean, yes, we could even argue that we have science fiction elements similar to The Expanse, but I'm sticking to my guns with magical realism just because of the feeling from beginning to end. And as for the "villain" of the piece, the fungus amongus? I saw where she was headed too early and I didn't find it compelling enough for me to care about how it played out. That last act needed another polish because it felt too cobbled together and disjointed making me even more disinterested. But a real solid first act! Too bad it didn't last.
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