Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Review by Rachel Farmer

Mexican Gothic starts with an exciting premise: a classic gothic, haunted house tale with a 1950’s Mexican twist. Our protagonist, Noemí, is sent by her father to check up on her cousin Catalina, who has written a disturbing letter from her new husband’s remote family home. From the moment she arrives at High Place, the family’s ancestral gothic mansion, Noemí dislikes the sinister atmosphere of the place and the frosty welcome from the family Catalina has married into. She starts to suffer chilling nightmares that are described in vivid, gory detail, and, gradually, she learns more and more about the family’s history and High Place’s dark past.

So far, so good. But, right from the outset, the writing style is confused. It meanders from overly pompous and formal to jarringly slangy, with glaringly inconsistent use of contractions: I occasionally found ‘she’d’ and ‘she had’ in adjacent sentences, for example. The dialogue is often high-flown and unnatural, with oddly poetic turns of phrase that feel incongruous and out of character. We are often told, through detailed descriptions of Noemí’s thought processes, how to react to a character’s words rather than letting those words speak for themselves. And some of the general descriptions explain things that would have been better left to the imagination.

Sometimes, the sense of place in the novel comes shining through: the tiny, remote town of El Triunfo with its brightly-coloured houses; the winding, treacherous track; the looming Victorian house, perched on a Mexican mountain. But, for the most part, the descriptions are a little long-winded, conjuring neither curiosity nor dread.

One contributing factor to the lack of tension could perhaps be the uneven pacing. The first two-thirds of the book progress slowly, with multiple trips to the local town for exposition purposes, and conversations between characters repeated. The plot doesn’t start to gather momentum until around the 200-page mark, whereupon the reader is suddenly thrown into a dramatic, increasingly gory finale.

At this point, the tension does start to ramp up and there are moments of genuine horror. The recurring motifs from the rest of the novel—snakes, mushrooms, buzzing noises—are (more or less) explained and the conclusion contains sufficient peril to make you fear for the characters’ safety.

Yet there are no twists and turns, no red herrings, and no false sense of security. Noemí’s immediate impressions of the house and the family members turn out to be correct; the novel rather plods towards its conclusion with only a couple of attempts at misdirection.

Mexican Gothic promises much but it fails to deliver on a number of counts. Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s 2015 debut novel Signal to Noise was a classic case of a strong concept with similarly imperfect execution. This novel’s premise was, to me, even more intriguing and unique, something that makes its lacklustre delivery an even greater disappointment.

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Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia is published by Jo Fletcher Books, 30/6/20

www.jofletcherbooks.com/titles/silvia-moreno-garcia/mexican-gothic/9781529402667/