Mexican Gothic

Mexican Gothic is a haunted-house novel in which the house is a biological organism and the family inside it are its gardeners, and the pleasure of it is watching an extremely unwelcome guest refuse to behave.

Noemí Taboada is the reason it works. She is twenty-two, wealthy, vain about her clothes, chain-smoking, more interested in anthropology than in the four marriage proposals she has turned down, and completely unsuited to the role of gothic heroine — which is precisely why Moreno-Garcia gives it to her. The Doyles want a woman who will be quiet, obedient and compatible; they have been handed somebody who asks direct questions at dinner, smokes in the house against the rules, and will not pretend she cannot hear what the patriarch is saying to her.

High Place itself is one of the better houses in modern horror: built by an English mining family who shipped the bricks and the cemetery and the furniture from Europe, run with no electricity above the ground floor, damp, silent, mould-stained, and staffed by people who do not speak. Moreno-Garcia's historical specificity is the best thing in the book — the silver mine, the dead workers in the family graveyard, the English family importing a eugenic ideology into Mexico and then collapsing into it.

The horror is fungal and it is the novel's real idea

Everything in High Place is downstream of a mould. The Doyles have bred it, eaten it, bonded with it and buried their dead in it, and what it gives them is continuity: a shared mind in the walls and a way for one consciousness to persist across bodies. Moreno-Garcia's handling of this is deliberately bodily — the dreams, the spores, the sleepwalking, the women in the family who are used as incubators — and the imagery of a house that is slowly becoming one creature with its owners is genuinely unpleasant in a way the genre rarely achieves.

The dream sequences are the strongest writing

Noemí's nightmares — a woman made of golden light, a wall that breathes, a figure in the corridor, her own body not obeying her — escalate from atmosphere to evidence over the middle third, and the novel's smartest structural choice is that the reader works out what is happening to her roughly a chapter before she does.

Where it is weaker

The first hundred pages are slow in a way that is more inert than ominous, and some readers never get past them. Francis is thinly drawn and the romance is the book's least convincing thread. And the final thirty pages accelerate into a chase that the preceding three hundred did not prepare the prose for.

For the novel this is deliberately answering, The Haunting of Hill House; for the Victorian text whose structure it inverts, Dracula; for the same procedural horror about who a society decides is livestock, Tender Is the Flesh.

The short answer: the fungus in the walls and under the cemetery holds a shared consciousness the family call the gloom, and Howard Doyle — nearly four hundred years old, kept alive in a succession of his own descendants' bodies — has reached the end of his current one. The plan for Noemí was never marriage to Virgil's cousin; she is a compatible body for the family to breed from, and Howard intends to transfer into Francis and then take her. Catalina has been kept docile with a tincture. Noemí and Catalina, with Francis's help, refuse: Francis will not be the vessel, Catalina stabs Virgil, Noemí destroys the fungal chamber beneath the house and sets fire to it, and Howard burns with the organism he has been keeping himself inside. The gloom dies with the mycelium. The three of them walk out and High Place burns behind them, and the novel closes with Noemí, Catalina and Francis on the road, choosing an undefined future over an inherited one.

What is the fungus in Mexican Gothic?

A fungal organism the Doyles found in the mountains and cultivated inside High Place, which grows through the walls, the cemetery soil and the bodies of everyone who lives there. It extends life, it heals, it produces visions, and it can hold and transmit a mind. The family eat it, breathe it and are buried in it, and the mine workers who died of a plague the Doyles caused were interred in the family graveyard specifically to feed it.

What is the gloom?

The collective memory held in the fungus: every Doyle who has died in the house, preserved inside the organism and accessible as a kind of shared space. Noemí enters it in her dreams. It is where Ruth — the daughter who shot her father, her relatives and herself in 1915 — still is, and the novel's best sequence is Noemí meeting her there and being told exactly what was done to her.

Who is Howard Doyle?

The patriarch, an Englishman who has been alive for centuries by moving his consciousness into the bodies of his own descendants through the fungus. He is in the final stages of a decaying body when the novel begins, bedridden upstairs, and the whole plot of the book is the arrangement of his next transfer. His eugenic obsession with bloodline compatibility is the reason for the family's generations of incest, and the reason outsiders are only ever brought in as breeding stock.

Why is Catalina ill at High Place?

Because she is being drugged and because the house is working on her. The family's physician has her on a tincture that keeps her compliant and that is also, the novel implies, part of the acclimatisation to the fungus; her letter home — which triggers the entire plot — was written in a lucid interval. The Doyles' account to her family is that she has tuberculosis and is prone to hysteria, which in 1950 nobody is going to question.

Is Mexican Gothic a romance?

Only partly, and the romance is the weakest strand. The Noemí–Francis thread exists mostly to give one Doyle a reason to break, and the novel is far more interested in Noemí's relationship with Catalina and in her refusal of every role the family offers her. Readers who come to it as a gothic romance in the Daphne du Maurier line will find the last hundred pages considerably more biological than expected.

Is High Place a real place?

No. The mining town of El Triunfo and the Doyle house are invented, though the history behind them is not: British mining companies operated extensively in Hidalgo and Real del Monte in the nineteenth century, and Moreno-Garcia's English family importing bricks, a cemetery and a race theory into Mexico is drawn from that record.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

Era bias 088 reads modern — 91 works score lower, which is a statement about the writing rather than the setting: the 1950 period is carefully researched and the prose, the pacing and the politics are entirely of 2020.

Tone 026 is bleak — 70 works score lower. Everyone in the family's history is a victim of it, including the ones who did the worst things, and the novel's one piece of mercy is that three people get out.

Viscera 052 is just above the median — 59 works score lower. A stabbing, a gunshot, a body dissolving into mycelium, a graveyard full of plague dead, and a great deal of fungal body horror.

The threat at 055 is just above the midpoint, which is the right reading: the organism is not human and everything it has been used for was arranged by a family of people with a eugenic programme.

Reality anchor 056 leans slightly towards dream logic — 56 works score lower, because a third of the novel takes place inside the gloom and the transitions are not marked.

Pace 028 is slow — 39 works are slower. The first third is dinners, corridors and refusals.

On shocks: few. The novel accumulates, and its worst moment is a conversation at a dining table.