Monday, August 3, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy/Horror Book Review: Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia



PRE-REVIEW NOTE:  This novel was my pick for my July Book Club (or well, my attempt at a book club).  That said, while discussion in the book club posts will involve spoilers, this review will NOT.  If you want to talk about this novel, because you've also read it this month, please do not comment on this review with anything that might constitute spoilers.  I have a spoiler-friendly post for discussing this book - as part of the Book Club - HERE: please feel free - in fact i hope that you will - to go full spoilery in thoughts on this book in the comments there instead.
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Mexican Gothic is the latest novel from Mexican/Canadian author Silvia Moreno-Garcia, who has over the past year or so become one of my favorite active writers in genre.  Moreno-Garcia's books cover a really diverse range - from basically straight romance (The Beautiful Ones) to vampire-fic (Certain Dark Things) to a journey with Aztec gods (Gods of Jade and Shadow) - although they very often are inspired by her Mexican heritage (and take place in some form of Mexico).  Mexican Gothic is another example of this: in it, she promises a move to Gothic Horror in a setting of 1951 Mexico.  Gothic Horror is not something I tend to seek out (nor Horror in general) - I can count one clear other example that I've read in the past two years - but with Moreno-Garcia writing, I was sure to give this a try - and felt confident enough to name it a pick for my first book club.

And Mexican Gothic is typical of Moreno-Garcia's excellence - a downright chilling horror novel featuring a strong setting, a terrific lead character, and strong themes to go along with everything.  These themes will resonate very much today - race and sexism prominent among them, as the story features a young Mexican woman coming face to face with an old family obsessed with purity and European ancestry among other things.  It's not a long novel, and yet it's exactly the right length to pull everything off, and I'd definitely recommend it for a read.

More after the jump:

-------------------------------------------------Plot Summary--------------------------------------------------
Noemí Taboada is a young woman in 1950s Mexico who simply wants space to do her own thing, whether that be flirting and partying with a ever changing set of men or obtaining a masters degree in anthropology -  instead of marrying and becoming a housewife as her parents would wish.  But when her father receives a frantic and insane sounding letter from her close cousin Catalina, she finds herself the member of the family sent to investigate the situation - and if necessary, rescue her cousin.  From what - Noemí has no idea.

So Noemí sets off for her cousin's residence - the ancestral home of her English husband in the Mexican countryside, a decaying estate known as "High Place."  There she finds an old dying family patriarch obsessed with purity of strong bloodlines, and matriarch with an utterly obsession with strict rules (no smoking, no talking during meals), and her cousin, no longer the jolly fun loving girl she once knew but now despondent and seemingly sick.  Noemí has no idea what to make of it, but the longer she stays there, the more she begins to see and hear things in High Place that make no sense, and her investigation into the place's history only reveals a dark past....a past that she comes to believe is more and more relevant to what is going on.....assuming she isn't actually going mad.....
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Mexican Gothic is in some ways follows what I consider a classic framing of the Gothic Horror genre: A young woman heads to a decrepit manor after getting a confusing and possibly mad cry for help, and finds it home to a creepy family and begins to see things and to wonder whether what she is seeing is real or if she's going mad.....it's a pretty classic formula I'm sure many people have seen a number of times.  As I've said before on this blog a large number of times:  That is not a bad thing in and of itself - formulas and tropes become classics for a reason (they're good and people like them and lead to good stories) and new executions of them can provide not only interesting stories, but new takes on themes older stories might have never dreamed of taking on.

Mexican Gothic is a good example of that.  So our setting here isn't the typical European estate - but one in Mexico (well, obviously).  And not just a part of Mexico that people may be familiar with, but rural Mexico, a place that relied once upon a mine for prosperity, and where the town has only a young doctor and a local herb woman for treatment of its people.  And so when we have this standard creepy English family in their decrepit manor which is rumored to be cursed and where no one in the town will go, it puts a totally fresh spin on how things look.  Here the English family are not just old, creepy and weird, they're totally out of place: only one of them even has a command of Spanish for example.

And that's before we get into the family patriarch's obsession with blood purity and eugenics, which he twists around in arguments about whether Mexican blood may be stronger than European in an early part.  Or how the patriarch literally imported mine workers from England to start, and maintains a graveyard for those workers, but not the local ones.  This is a gothic horror tale to be sure, and it's a really well done one in terms of the madness and horror elements, which I will not spoil here.  But the villain here is so terrible not just because of any monstrous aims he may have on Noemí or her cousin, but because of what lies behind those aims: racist believes about superiority of one type of people to go along with sexist beliefs about the wills and roles of women.  And as this is 1950s Mexico, sexism as to women's roles in society abound (Noemí's father isn't good either), but the Doyle family (the manor's family) take that to another level - and the member who is Catalina's husband absolutely takes that to creepy levels as Noemí wonders whether or not he is actually caring or abusive....

All this works so well mind you because Noemí is truly great as a heroine.  She's no detective nor caretaker, and she's not dead set on anything in life really: she enjoys school and wants to continue her schooling, but it's not something she's dead set on.  She's a young 20 something year old woman and really wants to enjoy life and not have to make a serious long term decision for herself just yet, unlike how traditions in the 50s might dictate.  But that strong sense of wanting her independence also makes her unwilling to simply accept how things are at the manor, which allows her to grasp some of what's going on before it's too late, and allows her to deal with things when they come to a head.  She's not only easy to root for, she's the exact antithesis of what the antagonists in this story really stand for, in a way that makes it easy to believe she can find a way to prevail.

So yeah, really good gothic fiction here, would recommend.  More spoilery talk in the book club post.

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