Published in 2020, this is by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. As the title makes clear, it's "Gothic", and that's one of my reading themes (most recently represented by Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray).

Moreno-Garcia was born in Mexico, but moved to Canada as an adult. Since she has Spanish as her first language, but writes in English, she also falls into my AWIALNTO (Authors Writing in a Language Not Their Own) category (the most recent of which -- I think -- was Yael van der Wouden's The Safekeep).

I had problems with Mexican Gothic, though, and one of them definitely relates to language. The English just sounded plain odd in places... (At least one reviewer made that kind of comment about The Safekeep, but I didn't especially notice because I was listening rather than reading. Here I noticed, and found it distracting.) Similarly, given the story is set in the early 1950s, some of the expressions -- "smarts" and "a paint job", for instance -- sounded distinctly anachronistic. To add to all that, I found a lot of the dialogue terribly stilted and unnatural. I know the whole concept of Gothic takes us a long way from the "natural", but even so...

Possibly I'm a language snob, and maybe that's not always a good thing, as my frustration with this aspect of the book seems to have prevented my seeing the good that others see.

Then again, some of the rave reviews are pretty misleading. Silas Mercer, for example, is one of many who suggest that if you like Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, you'll like this. That is so not true... Du Maurier's work is infinitely more subtle, ratcheting up the creepiness bit by careful bit. Mexican Gothic piles it up over your head from the get-go, and then keeps shovelling.

I read my way through it. I wanted to know the ending. And I was sufficiently engaged with the characters to want to see Francis rescued. Beyond that? Not much... But I do think I might have missed stuff.



***

So what's Mexican Gothic about? I can't do better than quote the Kirkus review:

"Inquisitive 22-year-old socialite and anthropology enthusiast Noemi Taboada adores beautiful clothes and nights on the town in Mexico City with a bevy of handsome suitors, but her carefree existence is cut short when her father shows her a disturbing letter from her cousin Catalina, who recently married fair-haired and blue-eyed Virgil Doyle, who comes from a prominent English mining family that built their now-dwindling fortune on the backs of Indigenous laborers. Catalina lives in High Place, the Doyle family’s crumbling mansion near the former mining town of El Triunfo. In the letter, Catalina begs for Noemi's help, claiming that she is 'bound, threads like iron through my mind and my skin,' and that High Place is 'sick with rot, stinks of decay, brims with every single evil and cruel sentiment.' Upon Noemi's arrival at High Place, she’s struck by the Doyle family’s cool reception of her and their unabashed racism. She's alarmed by the once-vibrant Catalina’s listless state and by the enigmatic Virgil and his ancient, leering father, Howard. Nightmares, hallucinations, and phantasmagoric dreams of golden dust and fleshy bodies plague Noemí, and it becomes apparent that the Doyles haven’t left their blood-soaked legacy behind. Luckily, the brave Noemi is no delicate flower, and she'll need all her wits about her for the battle ahead. Moreno-Garcia weaves elements of Mexican folklore with themes of decay, sacrifice, and rebirth, casting a dark spell all the way to the visceral and heart-pounding finale."

It would be unfair to reveal any more of the plot, but if you think along the lines of a "fungal memory network" (known as "the gloom"), which has impregnated the whole house and its locality, and is capable of forming a symbiotic relationship with human beings, controlling their dreams and actions, and even conferring immortality, you'll be on the right track.

The "elements of Mexican folklore" mentioned in that Kirkus review largely washed over me, I must admit (although I did warm to Marta, a kind of traditional healer, who tries to help Noemi).

But Jeni Rooba references "indigenous beliefs and traditions, such as the legend of the Nagual (a shape-shifting creature in Mesoamerican folklore)". And Joelle DuFault argues: "Mexican Gothic also utilizes the gloom as a metaphor for appropriated Indigenous traditions... The gloom divulges a local practice, in which 'the priest would have sacrificed himself: part of the body devoured, the rest buried' at the end of their lives... Moreno-Garcia uses Indigenous traditions as both a tool for resistance and a site of devastation conducted by colonizers." This commentator also notes that Moreno-Garcia "takes the classic Gothic trope of a house with a malevolent presence and anchors it in authentic Mexican folklore about death, memory, and the connection between the living and the dead. The Day of the Dead isn't just cultural decoration here. It's woven into the very fabric of horror."


Just for a bit of atmosphere, here's Kellie's Castle, Perak, Malaysia. Uber-haunted...

***

It was definitely not the horror-laden subject matter that put me off. I loved Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and you can't find a more malevolent house or a weirder family than those two give us. And I enjoyed the creepiness of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, E.F. Benson's Ghost Stories, and the strange tales (by W.W. Jacobs, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Elizabeth Bowen, and Kelly Link) that I wrote about here. I'm happy to wade further into the realms of horror, as with Black Water Sister by Zen Cho, or of vampiredom, as with Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. My disbelief is always willing to be suspended, and my goose bumps are ever ready to do their bit.

But the package of language-related gripes I touched on earlier got me off to a bad start, and kept me in a mild state of irritation throughout, with the result that I didn't really have enough patience for the more serious themes. Which are there. Anti-colonialism, for example, is demonstrated by fingering, as the root of all the horror, this eugenics-preaching white family, and their refusal to face their crimes as they continue to suck life from what is festering and putrid. It's a nice parallel, though executed a little heavy-handedly.

I definitely think I didn't give Mexican Gothic sufficient credit for being a trail-blazer. That list of books I just quoted are very much in the Western tradition, all set in Europe or North America. Moreno-Garcia tries to do something different.

As this commentator points out, "[The] novel became a true cultural phenomenon by blending visceral bodily horror with Victorian Gothic aesthetics, while putting Mexican characters and culture front and centre in a genre that had largely ignored them... For too long, Gothic horror had been dominated by white European perspectives. Mexican Gothic showed that there was room for other voices, other stories, other ways of understanding what scares us."



In all, it's very possible I'm undervaluing Mexican Gothic. And in not being bowled over, I'm clearly in a tiny minority. Mexican Gothic fares well on Goodreads (3.66 on not far short of half a million ratings...) That Kirkus review I quoted above is very positive. As is NPR's, which concludes: "We are asked to consider the terror of losing agency, of being part of or becoming monstrousness whether you will or not. Something is sick. Nothing is as it seems. We are possessed by the air we breathe. We are haunted by our bodies and the people who came before us. Can one escape that?"

So, I feel a little chastened by the discrepancy between my reaction and that of thousands of others. So, given that Moreno-Garcia writes in different genres, I feel I ought to have another shot one day.