By Megan Amato
Thanks to a duo of teenage babysitters who introduced four-year-old me to The Blair Witch Project and Alien, I had nightmares for years, jumping at every brush of a branch against my window. I avoided horror with varying degrees of success over the years and literally ran from the room at the first sign of any advert promoting a horror film. Despite this, the supernatural has always fascinated me. Throw in a speculative element and a haunted house, and I’m hooked enough to ignore the internal warning bell’s toll. That’s why despite my hesitation to read anything labelled horror, Mexican Canadian Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic intrigued me enough to add it to my Goodreads list.
At the novel’s opening, Noemí is sent to check up on her cousin, who has written a hysterical letter claiming that her English husband is poisoning her. Greeted with cold hospitality and prevented from being alone with her cousin, Noemí worries about this once-romantic cousin wilting in such an oppressive place. When she begins to have weird dreams about a dead woman, she suspects that there is more amiss in High Place than the mold-ridden walls and strict rules, and she discovers a history of cyclical violence that has stained the house and its members. At times romantic, sometimes grotesque, and often chilling, this gothic horror is sinister in a way that draws from Mexico’s colonial history to highlight the twisting insidiousness of race theory eugenics and exploitation wrought by Western Europeans on Indigenous peoples around the world.
In the beginning, the protagonist seems like an unlikeable character: Noemí is spoiled, toys with men and is seemingly fickle. As you read on, you discover that she is exceedingly clever, determined, and loyal to those she loves but ultimately a product of her time and place. As a young woman in 1920s Mexico, she has ambitions to be an anthropologist but is dependent on the men around her to get into the university and gain entry to all the places she wants to go.
At times the story can be slow-moving as Moreno-Garcia weaves the mystery around the history of the house and family, but never enough to pull me from the story or stop me from reading the book in two evenings. The plot is intricately woven, and I found myself collecting details to try and figure out just what was going on in that creepy house. The foreshadowing was done so well that even the hints I guessed accurately were only the tip of the vast iceberg that is the plot. The twist ending was unique, compelling and, to be honest, a little weird—but it worked.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia has masterfully written a book full of atmosphere and an eerie charm, combining myth and allegory with the exploitation of Mexico to deliver a terrifying novel that has even the scaredy-cat in me wishing to reread this novel all over.