Tuesday, January 3, 2023

SciFi/Fantasy/Horror Book Review: The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas

 




The Hacienda is a gothic horror novel written by debut author Isabel Cañas, with the novel taking place in the aftermath of the Mexican War of Independence.  The novel's marketing carries comparisons to Mexican Gothic (by Silvia Moreno-Garcia), last year's highly successful Mexican Gothic Horror novel, and one I liked quite a bit, just like most of Moreno-Garcia's works.  And there's something here to that - like Moreno-Garcia's work, this is a novel inspired by and based in the history and cultures of Mexico, in this case the time after it achieved independence, where the Country that colonized Mexico may be gone, but the impacts of colonization are not.  Add in Class-Conflict (again, influenced by colonialism), religious conflict, gender struggles, and well horror, and you have this novel.  

And it works generally pretty well, even if horror is not usually my main genre, and the book does the the thing where the protagonists ignore obvious clues for way way too long.  But the atmosphere is conveyed really excellently as the novel deals with two protagonists - a woman Beatriz who leaps into marriage to try to make her own way in a world where her family was ostracized for choosing the wrong side of the conflict and a priest Andrés who secretly comes from a family of native magic practitioners (a witch) who tries to help her cleanse the hacienda (estate) of a malevolent spirit that is threatening Beatriz and all the hacienda's inhabitants.  And the themes work pretty well too, so overall this is a recommend for someone looking for gothic horror with serious themes dealing with a culture that isn't for once American or European.  



--------------------------------------------Plot Review--------------------------------------------------
Beatriz's life was turned upside down when the side her father chose in the fight for Mexican Independence turned out to be the wrong one - costing her father his life and costing Beatriz and her mother their ability to live outside of the generosity of very spiteful distant relatives.  To change her path, she went against her mother and married Rodolfo, a man who did side with the winning revolutionaries, and whose family owns and controls Hacienda San Isidro far from the capital.  Beatriz could care less about Rodolfo or what happened to his first wife, but the Hacienda is everything she desires: a home to make her own, which she could use to live life on her own terms, one in which she could even bring her mother along and rescue her from their cousins.  

But Hacienda San Isidro is far from what she imagined.  The Hacienda is run down and lacking in many places, with weird runes on some walls, hallways that are inaccessible due to construction, and contains within it Rodolfo's sister Juana - a woman Rodolfo never even mentioned to Beatriz before.  Even worse, when Rodolfo goes away and leaves Beatriz behind, she begins to see eyes following her throughout the house, and a spirit seems to be haunting her and threatening any other person who dares step within the Hacienda grounds...

Soon Beatriz finds herself having trouble telling truth from delusion, and her only hope may be the young priest Padre Andrés, a priest with a connection to San Isidro and the magical practices that once were practiced there by the locals in order to live their lives healthily and happily, practices now denounced as witchcraft.....
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The Hacienda is the story of both Beatriz and Andrés, although most of the story follows and is told from Beatriz's point of view, with single chapters of Andrés interspersed every few Beatriz chapters.  The story begins kind of pointlessly in media res, but otherwise is chilling and gripping throughout, as Beatriz discovers the haunting and horrors of Hacienda San Isidro and Andrés' story flashes back to first his past and then to his own discoveries about what's going on with senses only he can see.  It's a story that is generally well told, except that one reveal kind of falls flat because well - the book foreshadows heavily a certain character's involvement in what's going on, and the main characters never catch on until basically the very end....and even then that catching on is rather abrupt and kind of random given how the protagonist missed the hints so so much earlier.  

But even with that one issue, The Hacienda still works because its supernatural haunting is still chilling, and the book's use of the post Mexican War of Independence setting to ground its horror and its characters works incredibly well.  San Isidro is a region in which the common people have basically suffered under the rule/ownership of Rodolfo's family, a region in which the local peoples used to practice what the Christian Spaniards called witchcraft* in order to live their lives.  But under the family and under the Catholic colonizers, such practice was swept underground even as the hauntings and things that people used the practices to stop continued, causing much pain and suffering.  And of course the rich colonizing nobles ruling the place, Rodolfo's family, couldn't care to understand that, spending much of their time elsewhere, not listening to women and half-blooded relatives, nevertheless the common people.

*The author made up these practices entirely as she details in an author's note, but their concept of course is real in how they represent the cultures destroyed and suppressed by Colonizing Catholic Spaniards* 

And so we have Beatriz and Andrés.  Andres is of course directly affected by the above, being magically gifted but having entered the Priesthood at his grandmother's advice in order to hide himself so that he could better help the people when he came back - only to struggle to find his own path while still hiding from an aggressive angry doctrinal priest.  Beatriz meanwhile understands as little as Rodolfo of the struggle of the common people, but she begins to understand completely when she sees herself disbelieved over the haunting of the House and how the only people willing to help her are Andrés and his cousin Paloma.  And she's especially primed to understand, because the Casta system frown upon her own mixed-blood heritage...and the winning forces of the Mexican War for Independence look down upon her own father's failure to choose the correct side and cast her into desperate poverty.  She is not like Rodolfo's first wife, a proper Spanish Catholic Woman who refused to allow Andrés to try and help the people of San Isidro, or like Rodolfo, who might be a monster towards those very people, because she is in her own way just as low as them in others' eyes.  

The result is a horror novel that is in fact quite scary and chilling at times but also deals with really strong themes, which makes it work quite well despite the fact that a major twist is ridiculously foreshadowed as noted above.  So yeah the publisher's reference to Mexican Gothic isn't undeserved, because like that novel this story uses horror to explore themes and issues faced by Mexicans in the wake of revolution, colonization and beyond, and does it very well.  Recommended for horror fans.  

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