Mexican Gothic

Mexican Gothic is Silvia Moreno-Garcia's 2020 horror novel, the Locus Award and Bram Stoker Award winner and the canonical contemporary Latin American gothic horror novel. Noemi Taboada, a 1950s Mexico City debutante and graduate student in anthropology, is summoned to the remote Hidalgo mountain town of El Triunfo by an alarming letter from her newly married cousin Catalina, who has married into the English-extraction Doyle family at their decaying mansion of High Place. The Doyle family made their fortune off a now-played-out silver mine in the surrounding mountains; the patriarch is a hundred-year-old eugenicist; the house is rotting; and Catalina's letter said the walls speak.

Moreno-Garcia's project is to take the British gothic tradition that produced Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, transplant it to mid-twentieth-century Mexico, and use it to interrogate the racial and colonial economy that gothic fiction historically has done its work to obscure. The Doyle family's eugenic obsession (the colonial mining operation, the English-bloodline preservation project, the literal fungal architecture of the house) is rendered with the kind of patient horror-procedural discipline that the best contemporary horror writers (Mariana Enriquez, Carmen Maria Machado) bring to their work. The Noemi protagonist treatment is the structural masterstroke: an Indigenous Mexican woman of standing whose anthropological training is exactly the wrong intellectual scaffolding to keep her safe in the Doyle house.

Recommended as required contemporary horror reading, as the right Moreno-Garcia entry point, and as one of the canonical contemporary Latin American literary horror novels. Read Velvet Was the Night (2021) and Silver Nitrate (2023) next. The Frankie Corzo audiobook is the definitive audio production. The 2023 Hulu adaptation has been in development limbo. Five stars without reservation.