Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia: A review

Mexico in the 1950s. Noemí Taboada is a twenty-something party girl living in Mexico City, the daughter of a rich family. She wants for nothing, except perhaps independence. Her role, as seen by her parents, is to find and capture a suitable husband and settle down to producing grandchildren. But Noemí has other ideas. She may be a flighty and flirty young woman who enjoys her effect on the men in her circle, but she also has a more serious side; she wants to go to college to study anthropology.

Her father sees no need for that but since she is stubborn in her desire for an education, he offers her a deal. He will allow her to go to college and study anthropology if she will do one teensy little favor for him first. 

Some months earlier her orphaned cousin, Catalina, had married a handsome English-Mexican named Virgil Doyle and they moved to his family's country estate and a house called High Place. Now Noemí's father has received a paranoid sounding letter from Catalina that accuses her husband of poisoning her and speaks of voices in the walls of the house and an overall aura of rot and decay. He asks his daughter to go and visit Catalina and find out what's going on. If she does this, she can go to college.

It seems like a good deal to Noemí, so she's up for it and off to the country she goes.

She finds High Place to be an imposing and gloomy pile and once she's inside she finds that Catalina had not exaggerated. It does exude an air of rot and decay. The walls are covered in mold and the Doyle family itself is pretty moldy. In addition to Virgil, there's his less attractive cousin Francis, Francis' mother Florence, the ancient family patriarch Uncle Howard, and various silent and robotic servants. Then, of course, there is Catalina who is confined to her room with (alleged) tuberculosis. Noemí finds that she is hardly allowed any time with her cousin and almost never alone. 

Then the hallucinations and the sleepwalking begin. Soon Noemí hardly knows whether she is waking or sleeping. She sees ghostly presences and hears voices and that mold on the wall of her bedroom seems to be moving...

Moreno-Garcia sets her creepy, eerie atmosphere with great attention to detail. One can feel the damp and smell that mold and shudder at the silent gloom of that huge house lit only with candles and oil lamps. The sensible thing for Noemí to do would have been to run as far and fast as she could and get help to rescue Catalina. But, of course, she doesn't do that. Plucky Noemí will rescue her all on her own. Well, she does at least find an ally in Francis, the least objectionable Doyle. 

I saw a positive review of this book in The Washington Post and then looked at the reviews on Goodreads, most of which were five-star raves. Well, I'm always up for a good gothic. Didn't I like Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights? And isn't one of my all-time favorite books Rebecca, a book which I read over and over again in my twenties? But, sadly, Noemí is no second Mrs. DeWinter, Francis is no Max, and Florence, though certainly creepy enough, is no Mrs. Danvers. And Moreno-Garcia is no Daphne du Maurier. She goes overboard on the creep factor of the Doyles and their gray, funereal house, but her characters are just words on a page. They never came alive for me and consequently, I couldn't care about them. By the time I got to the last quarter of the book, I was rushing through, just wanting to get to the end. Far be it from me to criticize anyone's rave review of a book. Read and let read is my motto. But I just couldn't "get" this one and I was glad to see the end of it.

My rating: 2 of 5 stars 

  

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