Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

As riveting as watching paint dry.

I wasn’t planning on reading this as I wasn’t all that enthused by Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Gods of Jade and Shadow. But, as I don’t like to write off authors on the basis of just one book & earlier this week I was in the mood for a gothic-kind-of-read, well, I decided to give Mexican Gothic a shot after all. And…yeah, my reading experience of Mexican Gothic was not a great one. The only reason I managed to finish it was because I listened to the audiobook at 1.75x speed.
If you liked this novel, ben per te. If you are thinking of reading it, I recommend you check out some more positive reviews as I have very few good things to say about it.

Let us begin with the supposed plot/story which takes place in 1950s Mexico (although dare i say, the historical setting was exceedingly generic). Noemí Taboada, our heroine, is a ‘spunky’ and ‘stylish’ young woman who enjoys going to parties, flirting with boys, and pursuing whatever she wants to pursue. Her father, a wealthy man, receives a letter from his niece and Noemí’s cousin. Catalina makes some alarming claims in her letter, hinting at some Big Bad™ and pleading for help. So Noemí’s father sends his daughter to High Place, Catalina’s husband’s family home where the newlywed couple resides. Once there, Noemí, so smart is she, notices that something is afoot. Almost every person in High Place is creepy af. We have Virgil, Catalina’s brutish yet handsome husband, who not only shows little concern over his wife’s malaise but he’s prone to making unpleasant passes at Noemí and seems the human embodiment of baseness (the villainous guy is indeed villainous? quelle surprise! ). His father, Howard, is even creepier than he is. He’s decrepit looking and into eugenics (don’t tell me…he’s also a baddie? no! i am shook). Then we have this woman called Florence who is also part of the family and seems a mere rip-off of Mrs Danvers. Her son, Francis, seems the only ‘nice’ person in the household but, as Noemí reminds us time and again, he’s so frail and shy, always doing his family’s bidding.

Nothing seems to happen. Noemí is sort of spooked but not really. She has bad dreams that she brushes off (i wonder if they really are dreams…or wait, don’t tell me, they are not ‘merely’ dreams? i am gobsmacked!). The house is creepy. Kind of. Noemí ‘disobeys’ the family’s rules by smoking indoors and taking off to the nearby town/village. There she comes across a character who serves the role of explainer, as she recounts the Doyles’ family history and of how the miners they employed died a mysterious death (or something along those lines). Despite knowing this and her cousin’s ravings about the house & her ‘new’ family Noemí doesn’t really cotton on to the situation. She is presented as this subversive modern Gothic heroine who doesn’t take shit from anyone and swears (such a badass, isn’t she?) because she isn’t afraid of being rude and gets indignant about the racist/sexist/generally offensive remarks made by this remarkably deranged family…and yet, in spite of all of these things, she struck me as frustratingly passive and, worst still, una vera cretina. And, one could say that it is understandable, she was being ‘gaslighted’ by those twisted and nefarious Doyles and by the house itself…but the thing is, she was also getting some pretty clear messages from beyond the veil (and she wasn’t the sceptic type who totally writes off the supernatural and she wasn’t the only one experiencing this ‘disturbing’ stuff so…).

The storyline was uneventful, filled with scenes that seem lifted from other works of Gothic: shifting shapes/people in the walls? The Yellow Wallpaper; incest? The Castle of Otranto, The Monk, Flowers in the Attic, Crimson Peak; female mc is concerned because her newly married sister/cousin seems to have fallen mysteriously ill and her husband is clearly after her fortune? The Woman in White; Haunted house? Puh-lease, anything Shirley Jackson; inclusion of hard-hitting topics such as the horrors of ‘post-Enlightenment scientific racism’? Beloved.

This novel consists of Noemí having the same tedious conversation with the same boring characters. She gets the heebie-jeebies, does nothing about it. Her sleuthing? What sleuthing? She sort of figures things out towards the end but not really. More often than not ‘stumbles’ her way through this supposed ‘mystery’. And then we just had to have the villains explain things to her in their diabolical villainous monologues.

I did not find Noemí to be an engaging character. The way she comported herself struck me as overwhelmingly anachronistic. Someone ‘cool’ modern audiences can root for. Look at her, she gets angry when insulted! She swears! What a riot! An icon! A real feminist!

Don’t get me started on the other characters. If the story hadn’t taken itself so seriously I could have almost appreciated them (in a, look at them, they are clearly so OTT). But the story does seem to present them as these figures we should ‘fear’…speaking of fear. Was this meant to be horror? Not once was I creeped out or scared or anxious. If anything, I found the prose, dialogues, and character interactions to be so corny that there was no way I could feel apprehensive on the behalf of Noemí (who, truth be told, i did not care for in the least).

While the imagery and atmosphere did occasionally strike me as effectively Gothic, the setting and story would have benefited from more descriptions. The house in particular is depicted in such vague terms that I had a hard time visualising it (from its architecture to its interior decor). In my humble opinion, Gothic tales featuring haunted houses necessitate more evocative descriptions.
The whole mushroom/gloom thing was preposterous. It made the story all the more ridiculous.

So, to recap, this is why I did not like this:
☞ Storyline: nothing interesting happens, there is barely any suspense unless you believe that one-dimensional creepy characters who act creepy from the get-go are a source of tension (personally i don’t).
☞ Characters: clichèd? Not even in a fun way? They were really uninspired. Noemí wasn’t as annoying as the heroine from Gods of Jade and Shadow (who was very much a cinderella sort of figure) but she was so thick. The spooky family was laughably ‘evil’. And I can’t say that I like it when male characters who are physically described as frail-looking, not very ‘masculine’, are made into weak cowards (yeah, the guy here ultimately steps up but for the majority of the novel he is basically a carpet).
☞ Dynamic/relationships: very surface level? Especially between the various family members. We get very few interactions between them and they seem to regard each other as strangers. Also, the interactions between these characters seemed so stilted, theatrical even.
☞ Gothic elements: I know this genre is known for being derivative, for sticking to the same tropes etc…but this was written in the mid-to-late 2010s…surely, the author could have subverted some of these tropes? Her supposedly ‘spunky’ heroine is as hapless as an Ann Radcliffe one.
☞ Ghosts/Haunting: banal? As uninspired as everything else about this book?
☞ Historical setting: uberly generic. Thrown in a ‘women had it worse than now’, a few quaint phrases/expressions, some good ol’ racism/sexism/bigotry….and there you have it, historical vibe achieved!
☞ Prose: simple, silly, and dramatic yet trying now and again to be ‘edgy’ and serious.

Also, I know this is not an entirely ‘valid’ criticism, but this is the second novel that I’ve read by this author and the lack of queer characters is…disappointing.

I think that this novel has confirmed that Moreno-Garcia is not the author for me. I’m happy other readers can appreciate her work, I, however, cannot in good faith count myself among her admirers. Maybe one day I will try something else by her…maybe (tis’ unlikely).

my rating: ★★½

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