Mexican Gothic

A Haunting With Deep Roots

Noemí Taboada is not the typical gothic heroine. She is not naive, not passive, not easily frightened. She is a Mexico City socialite — stylish, educated, impatient with condescension — who arrives at High Place, the Doyle family’s crumbling Hidalgo estate, because her cousin Catalina has sent a disturbing letter suggesting she is being poisoned. Noemí intends to find out why.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s 2020 novel arrived during the pandemic and became a word-of-mouth phenomenon. Its pitch — Gothic horror in 1950s Mexico, with echoes of Rebecca and Du Maurier’s femme gothique tradition — attracted readers who wanted the pleasures of classic genre fiction with something more intellectually ambitious underneath.

Colonial Horror as Core

What distinguishes Mexican Gothic from its Anglo precursors is its explicit engagement with colonial violence. The Doyle family are English mine owners whose wealth in Mexico was extracted from indigenous labor under conditions that amounted to slavery. Their estate, High Place, is literally built on that history — the house’s corruption and the horror it harbors are extensions of the violence that created it.

This isn’t allegory operating at remove; Moreno-Garcia makes the connection explicit. The horror of High Place is colonial horror, and the family that sustains it is monstrous precisely because they have made their violence systematic and self-perpetuating.

Noemí Against the House

The novel’s central relationship — between Noemí’s fierce, skeptical intelligence and the house’s systematic effort to undermine it — is the source of its most effective dread. The Doyle family’s gaslighting is both psychologically realistic and literally supernatural, and Moreno-Garcia keeps the ambiguity intact long enough to make the revelation satisfying.

Noemí as protagonist is a genuine contribution to the gothic tradition. She is not saved by her own innocence or by a male protector; she saves herself through intelligence, stubbornness, and solidarity with her cousin.

Gothic Pleasures Earned

The atmosphere — moldering wallpaper, mushroom-damp corridors, a patriarch who quotes eugenicists at dinner — is executed with tremendous skill. The horror, when it fully materializes, is genuinely disturbing. The colonial critique is woven into the narrative fabric rather than imposed on it.

The Gothic Tradition, Reclaimed

Mexican Gothic is in deliberate conversation with the canon of the form — Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, the Brontës, Shirley Jackson’s haunted houses — and part of its pleasure is watching Moreno-Garcia inhabit those conventions while turning them to new purposes. The isolated estate, the sinister patriarch, the imperiled young woman, the house that seems to have a will of its own: all the familiar machinery is present and lovingly deployed. But by relocating the genre from the English moor to the Mexican mountains and centering a confident, modern Mexican heroine rather than a trembling English ingénue, Moreno-Garcia exposes what the classic gothic often left unspoken — that the decaying aristocratic house is frequently a monument to stolen wealth. The novel reads as both a fond homage and a pointed critique, claiming a tradition that rarely made room for characters like Noemí and bending it toward her perspective.

The Horror of High Place

The source of the novel’s dread, once revealed, is one of recent horror’s more original inventions, and it fuses the book’s themes into a single grotesque image. Without spoiling the mechanism, the Doyle family’s immortality and control are bound up with the house itself, with fungus and decay and a kind of biological colonialism, so that the literal horror and the historical one become inseparable: a family that consumes and absorbs in order to perpetuate itself, feeding on those it deems lesser. The body horror is visceral and genuinely disturbing, building from atmospheric unease — damp walls, strange dreams, a wrongness Noemí cannot name — to fully realized nightmare. Moreno-Garcia paces the revelation with patience, keeping the ambiguity between psychological and supernatural alive until the moment the truth lands with maximum force.

Eugenics and the Doyle Family

What gives Mexican Gothic its intellectual spine is its engagement with eugenics, the pseudoscience of racial “improvement” that flourished in the early twentieth century. The Doyle patriarch, Howard, is a believer in racial hierarchy who quotes its theorists at the dinner table and treats the indigenous Mexican workers and Noemí herself through that lens, and the family’s project of purity and self-perpetuation is the eugenic fantasy made literal and monstrous. Moreno-Garcia connects this ideology directly to the colonial extraction that built the family’s fortune, so that the horror is not a metaphor floating free of history but a concentrated image of real historical evil. This is rarer and braver than the genre usually attempts, and it lifts the book from atmospheric entertainment into something with a genuine argument.

A Heroine Who Saves Herself

Noemí Taboada is the novel’s greatest asset and its clearest break from tradition. Glamorous, quick-witted, formidably stubborn, and entirely unintimidated by the men who try to manage her, she is the antithesis of the passive gothic victim. She is not rescued by a suitor or saved by her own innocence; she survives through intelligence, persistence, and loyalty — above all her refusal to abandon her cousin Catalina to the house. Moreno-Garcia writes her with wit and texture, giving her a vanity and a temper that make her feel fully human rather than merely heroic. In a genre that has too often defined women by their fragility, Noemí is a protagonist who acts, and her agency is central to why the novel resonated so powerfully with contemporary readers.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — A gorgeous, ideologically serious gothic novel that uses the genre’s pleasures to interrogate colonial violence with more honesty than most literary fiction manages.

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