Mexican Gothic - Silvia Moreno-Garcia

★★★½☆☆

Moreno-Garcia translates the grey-skies-and-thunder aesthetic into a more colourful post-revolution Mexican town in a way that breathes new life into all the little tropes that make the gothic genre what it is. Holding the revolution in mind also provides silent flavour to the book's interrogation on the uses and harms of ancestral memory - of tradition's place in the face of modernity. Our heroine Noemí, too, orbits this conflict. She is lovely and ladylike, yet vibrant and unafraid to push men. She delivers the very satisfying carnage of properly-weaponised femininity.

Now, this may be my trash speaking, but since this book is explicitly gothic, I feel it could have gotten away with a little problematic tragedy. The romance, in my opinion, would have had more oomph had Noemí gotten twisted up with Virgil instead of Francis. Francis is solid and I admire Moreno-Garcia humanising Virgil by inviting us to pity him, I just would have admired her more if she pushed further into that direction since the strength of his personality seemed to better match Noemí's. I believe she could have retained her sovereignty and fearlessness to push even if she stooped to joining their rotten state. However, I acknowledge that this view may also just be a testament to the terrible potential written into those mouldphrodisiac scenes.

For more like this, try Edgar Allan Poe's short story, The House of Usher or T. Kingfisher's What Moves the Dead.

On Storygraph