Book review: Mexican Gothic

⭐5/5

“The walls speak to me. They tell me secrets. Don’t listen to them, press your hands against your ears.”

An isolated mansion, a family cloaked in fleeting riches and hushed voices, and a brave socialite drawn to expose their terrible secrets.

After receiving a frantic letter from her newly wed cousin begging to be saved from terrible doom, Mexico City’s most glamorous debutante and socialite, Noemí Taboada, heads to High Place, a distant house in the Mexican countryside. She doesn’t know what she’ll find at High Place, but she’s on a mission to find out if her cousin’s claims result from sickness or mistreatment from her new husband, a handsome yet mysterious Englishman.

Something doesn’t sit well with Noemí upon her arrival to High Place. The English family is inhospitable; their strict rules and hushed conversations make her suspicious. Ignoring any warnings to keep to herself, Noemí digs deeper to unearth the family’s secrets of violence and madness. She isn’t afraid of her cousin’s new husband, who is both menacing and alluring; nor of his father, the ancient patriarch with an unsettling fascination for Noemí.

But perhaps Noemí should be afraid. Afraid of the house that she may soon find impossible to ever leave.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia is one of my favorite authors. She delivers exceptional experiences across multiple genres, so when I saw she had written a Gothic Horror, I was beyond excited.

Mexican Gothic has the air and scenery of Wuthering Heights with a lasting sense of fear from a Stephen King’s book. Once again, Moreno-Garcia gave us a cast of unique characters along with a championing protagonist who I couldn’t but root for from the start. It’s rare for me to get absorbed into a narrative in a way that I cannot stop thinking about it. Noemí and her misadventures followed me through my days and, when the sun went down, a sense of unease would settle in my chest. The horror is suggestive, unsettling, and ghastly, but it doesn’t feature excessive gore or torture. Nevertheless, High Place and its secrets gave me nightmares, and yet, I couldn’t stop reading.

I took this book with me on a trip to Mexico. One night, I fell asleep in my childhood home reading a specially unsettling chapter. I woke up at 3 AM to the incessant barking of the neighbor’s dogs. My mind went to the local tale of an apparition: a tall man, garbed in dark clothes, that calls out to pedestrians on the corner of my neighborhood. A fear of the supernatural I hadn’t felt since I was a child assaulted me and all I could think about was of Noemí and the horrors she was living in that mansion, sequestered up a foggy mountain.

I can’t pinpoint why exactly this book affected me so. Perhaps it was the closeness to my country and how well our culture is depicted in this read. Or perhaps it’s the fact that I saw a part of myself in Noemí, who learned rebellion as a young girl while muttering the rosary. I don’t know what it is, but this story has climbed to my favorite read of 2021 and I don’t see it climbing down any time soon.