Mexican Gothic

3 stars

I had high expectations for Mexican-Canadian author Silvia Moreno-Garcia's acclaimed novel, but was pretty let down. Given the book's title, yes, there was everything classically gothic, but very little Mexican, aside from the geographic setting (and the occasional Spanish word). This tale of a rich city girl going out to a country mansion to rescue her married cousin after receiving a disturbing letter about her seeing ghosts and being unwell could have been set anywhere. I thought there'd be something connected to the Mexican indigenous culture, or maybe the some local mythology or folklore, but none of that was in the story. On the contrary, there was a decaying gothic mansion; rich aristocrats from England who are creepy, mean and strict; ghostly and strange nightmares; misty countryside (even in Mexico); and sickly, bedridden characters with mysterious ailments. Into that classic template, drop Noemí Taboada even though she's not a very traditional Mexican. She's a chic modern rich girl who enjoys her nightlife even more than her graduate education in anthropology.

When Noemí goes to High Place to rescue her cousin, Catalina, the story unfolds fairly predictably. There is almost no surprise. Will Noemi find something strange and creepy with the Doyle family? Will Noemí find that there is something to her cousin's delusions about ghosts? Will the Doyle family have unnecessarily strict rules about what Noemi can and cannot do? Will Noemi try to break those rules? Will something dark be secretly lurking at High Place? Will this family turn out to be more bizarre and twisted than they seem? I don't need to answer a single one of those questions for you. You can answer them yourself already.

Noemi was not a standout character. I don't think we knew her very well, despite hearing about her backstory a bit, and constantly hearing her thoughts. Being a pretty debutante, I expected her to play against trope, not be shallow, but actually possess a lot of buried strength and depth. Sadly she didn't really feel like that. Don't get me wrong, Moreno-Garcia's writing isn't bad. She was able to provide fairly vivid descriptions and painted every scene with an appropriately decaying sense of beauty, but I also don't feel she really flexed any extraordinary amount of imagination in word or idea.

The narrator was also mixed. Her performance in the characters's voices was pretty expressive, given how serious most of the characters were. Unfortunately, her English accent needed work. Plus, whenever she went into her narrator voice, she got kind of stilted and pronounced everything with an extremely even tone, I even suspected to be AI a couple of times. That really kind of flattened the mood (and in a gothic tale, the mood is half the story).

As I mentioned at the start, this novel was overall quite disappointing. I like my creepy Lovecraftian horror and my gothic tales, but this one was middling.