Mexican Gothic

The story is strange, and there are several scenes with attempted sexual assault and violence that are very unexpected for a story like this

It is rare that I don’t finish a book. Especially an audible book. But I couldn’t bear to listen to this book for one more moment.
The narrator has a mono tone voice that raises at the end of each sentence. All the characters, all the descriptions sound exactly the same and fade into a background lull reminiscent of a sleep app audible sleep aid.
The book itself has characters that are unlikeable. Once the author stated describing mushrooms in extensive detail I abandoned the book. I found myself forcing myself to listen and life is too short for that.

I really like the book although I will stay in the very beginning. It started off a little slow, but as I got into it, it started picking up more and as far as Gothic literature sounds this is my first time reading a horrible book like that and I’m very impressed and I cannot wait to read more of Sylvia’s books

Narrator was fine.. wasn’t a fan of the main character whose entire personality is being pretty or the dialogue which felt very YA.

This was a reading group book and although I finished it, I really, really struggled to do so. I found the writing style like wading through treacle and really disliked all the characters. Not for me at all.

I'm still not sure if I liked this book or not. It intrigued me from the get go, and I enjoyed the writing style....but frankly I spent the majority of the time saying "What the actual f***", both out loud and in my head. I feel like the end was somewhat anti-climactic overall, and how it all wound up there was just so bizarre.
I really don't know what else to say.

Really disappointing. I had much higher hopes for this but the big reveal kind of fell flat.

I liked the writing, overall story, and protagonist. However, it was sold as terrifying/horror story, and I just didn't think it was that scary. I am a Clive Barker fan, and maybe because of that, I have a higher threshold of horror.

Two stars = ok. The book is ok. The narrator is ok. Everything is ok.

Okay so. Moreno-Garcia did her research before writing this book. And she lets you know. Right down to listing scientific names for fungi and chemical compounds that the characters recall off the tops of their heads.

The story centers on a woman in Mexico around the 1920's, I think? 50's? At any rate, she is of a wealthy family who grumbles about her wanting to pursue an education and not get married. She is attending University and has changed majors several times, for which she's teased by her family. But. A woman attending University would have been rare and she likely would have had to fight to remain in school since the gender stereotypes and cultural expectations are still dominant today and were even more pervasive back then. That she is so flippant about everything is super modern and her ideas about Anthropology seem too convenient to assist in the info dumps that are scattered throughout the novel.

The dialogue is very clunky and full of too much information. The descriptions are cinematic to a fault. Moreno-Garcia is clearly imagining the film version of this novel as she tries to describe what is happening to her characters. We get much less empathic connection to the characters (required in any novel, but especially a gothic novel, I think) and more description of things like the lighting and what color someone's eyes are. She repeats her descriptions every time her characters enter a room as well, making for a tiring read.

And in the end, this fiercely (modern), independent, educated woman who begins the novel by fighting to pursue her passions, ends up in the arms of a man and lives happily ever after. Not exactly the picture of empowerment it started out as.

The bad guys are cool, if poorly written, but rely heavily on spoon-feeding the complicated plot to the reader. The whole thing would have been much better had all the unnecessary details been cut, with more focus on character development. Noemi is exactly the same person at the end of the novel that she was at the beginning.

Didn’t plan to spend the whole day reading but...it’s a slow burn and unputdownable once you get 1/3 in...

Reading this book is like peeling an onion. Things seem ordinary, but layer by layer, they get more eerie and gothic, and you read on to find out what's with the Doyle family.

Gothic horror set in Mexico in the 1950s. After receiving a letter from her sister, protagonist Noemí Taboada heads to a former mining town and stays at High Place, a remote country estate. She meets a cadre of peculiar residents, members of the Doyle family.

Noemí is a strong and well-drawn character, and it is easy to root for her. The mansion is a character unto itself. I could easily picture it in my mind. The story is creepy and eerie. It is not necessarily “scary” (I guess that depends on your “scare level.”), which was an advantage for me since I am not generally a reader of horror. I picked this one up as a seasonal read around the Halloween theme and enjoyed it much more than expected.

2024 book #24. 2020. 22-yo Noemi' lives a happy life in 1950 Mexico City until her father sends her to visit her cousin, now married to the master of a dark and moldy mansion far from the city. An OK start but the reason for the creepiness of the place was a bit far out for me.

Absolutely fantastic!

Well, this title of this one is a pretty good case of truth in advertising. It's set in Mexico (in 1950), and it's chock-full of gothic elements: a large, crumbling house; a misty graveyard; disturbing family secrets; a woman afflicted by what might be madness or might be ghosts... you name it. It does good things with all of those elements, making them feel as natural as if they'd just been invented solely for its own purposes, and while the story builds a bit slowly, it does so not at all unpleasantly and eventually ends up in some fairly impressive flat-out horror.

Rating: I'm giving it 4/5, but I feel a bit stingy with that, and am having a giant debate with myself as to whether to give it another half star, if only for how engaged with it I was by the end.

Wow. Somehow I saw this as a dark novel and missed it is classified as 'horror.' Horror or fantasy are not genres I go for. The first half is like a dark mystery. Begin with a decaying mansion at the top of the hill, where mold seems to be everywhere. Then it gets more and more twisted. Then strange dreams. And stranger people. And walls that talk.

That I kept turning the pages and finished it is a testament to great writing, an original plot, and my curiosity. The story sucked me in. I kept wondering, how was it going to end? No spoilers, but you'll get it if you read it. I couldn't leave the book unfinished without knowing the end.

Think Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier or Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, then set the story in 1950s Mexico. It is more novel than horror. I'm glad I read this book, as it expands my reading repertoire, and I experienced a new author. I recommend the book. It will grab you and take you on a ride through dark tunnels as you hope to find the exit.

An isolated mansion. A chillingly charismatic aristocrat. And a brave socialite drawn to expose their treacherous secrets. And a gorgeous book cover!

Be warned: this isn't a light-hearted fun read. And don't read this book before going to bed, specially if you have vivid imagination. Trigger warnings: murder, gore, incest, sexual abuse, and violence.

I don't read horror books, but Mexican Gothic is what my book club picked for Dec-Jan, giving me an excuse to step out of my comfort zone. The first 9 chapters or so felt slow, but then the story picks up pace and it gets pretty grotesque and insane from there. This book is bizarre yet fascinating!

While the book is set in 1950s Mexico, not much has been written about the Mexican culture, nothing prominent, anyway. There is mention of eugenics and the Revolution, but they lack depth.

The main character Noemí was just the right amount of sassy and defiant to be interesting and likeable. She may seem like such a spoiled brat but as we get to know her, it becomes clear she has a soft spot for her cousin, Catalina, and wants to help her. Speaking of Catalina...she has such a passive character. Noemí doesn't really get to spend enough time with her, and sometimes it feels like Catalina is forgotten half of the time.

Overall, I loved reading Mexican Gothic, even though it completely creeped me out and kept me turning the pages in a non-stop anxious frenzy.

Mexican Gothic lives up to it's name! What a compelling set of characters populate this tale of horror. Recommend!

The Gothic part of the title indicates that it harks back to the classic horror stories of the 1800s. While the book will please readers who want to read a book written in an old fashioned way, I couldn't not relate emotionally to it. It isn't scary or a fun dip into an old style. I didn't finish.

And let it be noted that Alibrate didn't let me give it half a star!

I hate this book.

Not only is it written in a tedious, boring way, and from the beginning, it's obvious what is happening and where it's going (one could say it's a spoiler for "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe), but it also has absolutely nothing "Mexican" about it.

I read this novel in English, as at that time the publisher hadn't even considered making a Spanish translation. The book came out at a time when stories written by "Latinos" of second and third generation residing in the United States, dealing with "Latin American topics," were in fashion. The author, Silvia Moreno-García marketed herself as a "Mexican living in Canada," and at that time, there was nothing available regarding her life: there was no way to know if she was a Mexican taken to Canada as a child, a Mexican who sought refuge in the 1990s "due to increased insecurity," a Canadian born to Mexican parents, etc. Also, at that time, the author already had at least three other fantasy novels set in Mexico that had good reviews (none of which I had read, nor have read), so when "Mexican Gothic" came out, I said to myself: "Yay! A gothic novel set in Mexico! Let's read it!..." And I will never read anything from this author again.

To start with, you'll notice that the publisher that did the Spanish translation (no, the supposedly Mexican author did not translate it nor originally wrote it in this language) changed the title to "Gótico" instead of leaving it as "Gótico mexicano." There is a very good reason to do this: everything that happens in the story could happen anywhere else in the world where the English have had a colony. You could take the "High Place" mansion and transplant it from "Hidalgo" to Singapore, Ceylon, Belize, Jamaica, and of course, the moors of northern England, without having to make almost any changes to the story, because none of what is described has to do with Mexico. The mansion is generic, the family is a generic English family, the landscape is a generic foggy one, but above all, the people are generic. There are very few characters outside the protagonist, her cousin, and the English family she lives with, and these characters are interchangeable generic extras from any Hollywood movie set in an "exotic" location. There is nothing "Mexican" about them, except for the fact that the author tells us they are Mexican.

Then, by the very fact of setting the plot in an English mansion, with a staunch English family extremely attached to their ways and customs, there is nothing "Mexican" in the house, which is a very important part of the plot. Because if you take an "English manor" and place it in the mountains of Hidalgo, Mexico, it remains an "English manor."

And then, and this is the part that annoys me the most, the protagonist is supposed to be a rich girl, daughter of a wealthy family and "a family of renown" in the 1950s in Mexico. These kinds of families were very conservative, which means they protected their daughters "tooth and nail" until they were married. Because of this, there is no way the protagonist's father would send his daughter ALONE, without any chaperone, to another state, on a train trip without anyone accompanying her, without certainty that someone would receive her at the last station, to live with a family she does not know, in a house she has never visited, with people she distrusts. That was unthinkable and could not happen. This gentleman, if he really existed, would NEVER have allowed his daughter to roam like a "loose woman" without someone to take care of her through the mountains of Mexico. In other words, this novel could not have possibly occurred in Mexico in the 1950s as the author recounts.

And to be honest, it really bothers me that after all this, she still dared to name the novel "Mexican Gothic."

On top of that, as I already said, the book is boring, more than half of it goes by without anything of importance happening, the pace is slow and heavy, and the ending is extremely obvious.

Who would I recommend this book to? Not even to my worst enemy. (Translated from Spanish)

Not my cup of tea.

I read this in one sitting and it was intense, creepy, crazy, and got really weird. It's a very gothic story and atmosphere that is an appropriate type of read for this time of year with the cold, dark winter and everything. This book does pretty much live up to the hype.
The only thing with this book I'd caution is that toward the end what I noticed more is that there's some profanity/crude language and a bit of a shock at the end with a brief bit of gore and violence that grossed me out, but other than that I enjoyed this quite a bit.

First time reading this genre and it hooked me in the first chapter, I like the fitting words for the time period in which it is narrated, I give it 4 stars for the ending. (Translated from Spanish)

dark mysterious slow-paced
Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

The book in one word... boring.

Obviously, this is not my typical book, you could even say that I have no business reading it. However, this was recommended as a horror title and who doesn't want to mix things up with a horror title every once in a while. Sadly, this was as suspenseful as a wet paper towel and has as many thrills as a bucket of dirt. Couple this with a vapid and unlikeable protagonist and a twist that literally made me laugh out loud, this one deserves the "one star review".

A woman marries in haste, then sends a disturbing letter to her uncle, begging for help. She is ill, but she cannot leave her new home, High Place. So her cousin travels there, to see what is going on. She discovers much more than she bargained for. In this paranormal horror story, Noemi enters a place unlike any she has ever seen. Servants are rarely allowed to talk. There is no dinner conversation. Her visits with her cousin are supervised. The longer Noemi is there, the stranger things become. She has nightmares, she sleepwalks, and she is destined to become a prisoner there along with her cousin. On one of her rare supervised trips to town, she visits a healer to get a secret tincture requested by her cousin. And what the healer tells her about the family that her cousin married into turns Noemi’s blood cold. This story is a bit reminiscent of “Rebecca” with strong overtones of “The House on Haunted Hill.” Some of the chapters were a bit slow moving, and the novel could have used some tighter editing, but it does build up the suspense even while you wish the author would just get on with it. The last third of the tale is quite exciting as even stranger happenings occur. As with many horror stories, readers need to suspend their belief in reality to enjoy the fantasy. The protagonists are well developed, and the story wraps up nicely, although a sequel would not be out of line.

I had high hopes for Mexican Gothic, given I’ve always been a fan of the Gothic novel; while Moreno-Garcia does use Gothic tropes—especially in the first third of the book—the novel soon devolves into a supernatural horror, a genre I’m definitely not a fan of.

Socialite and spoiled socially privileged Noemí Taboada travels from 1950s Mexico City to Hidalgo, where, from the crumbling mansion High Place, her cousin Catalina has written cryptic letters to Noemí’s father suggesting that her husband, Virgil, is poisoning her and that she hears and sees things in the walls. As an ambassador of sorts, a term she often applies to herself, Noemí is sent to ascertain the gravity of the situation, but soon gets caught up in the tangled web of decay, power, and control at High Point.

This premise would make for a very interesting book; here, however, Moreno-Garcia is constantly bringing in textual reminders and literary allusions to Gothic tales of yore: Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights get mentioned many times, and when Noemí recalls the Catalina she knew during adolescence, she is always reading fairy tales and getting lost in those mythic worlds. These allusions occur in virtually every chapter of Mexican Gothic, making it obvious that Moreno-Garcia is attempting to situate her own book within such traditions, but perhaps also in an attempt to remind herself that she’s doing just that, so as not to lose the thread… which she does, because, in the end, the book goes on a downward spiral to nowhere.

This is currently the number one bestseller on Amazon under the genre of magical realism; it certainly isn’t that, but the novel is also certainly not Gothic—not in the Radcliffe way, not in the Burke-infused way (with all things sublime and beautiful), and not even in the more feminist Gothic vein of, say, Gilman or Du Maurier. The supernatural elements in true Gothic novels get explained, rationalized away; in Mexican Gothic, it just goes deeper and deeper into one of the most ludicrous, nonsensical supernatural plots I’ve ever read, where dreams are intended to enlighten the reader about the past, but end up confusing them instead since these scenes are not executed well. It appears, too, that there is some social commentary and critique at work in Mexican Gothic, with the mention of the Mexican Revolution and its ongoing repercussions, the way women are treated as objects to be possessed by men, and so on… but these are never treated with the depth they deserve to be fleshed out fully and made to bear on the novel as a whole.

Mentions of Jung and Freud (the latter of whom Noemí—or Moreno-Garcia—entirely misreads) also abound, which would make for a nice pull back to the Gothic genre and how it speaks (as in Poe, for example) to human psychology and the uncanny; but these also feel like name-droppings peppered throughout a text that meanders, doesn’t truly build its own characters, has a very cliched and haphazard love pairing, and has some very awkward writing. As an example of the latter, despite being written in a fairly straightforward manner to keep the reader's interest piqued, there are times when Moreno-Garcia is in need of better editing, e.g., when she overuses or underuses commas; when she uses antiquated syntax and/or clauses that are more akin to Henry James or Marcel Proust. I’m a huge fan of these two writers, of course, and take no issue whatsoever with work that pays homage to their prose styles, but a sentence like the one below just pops out of nowhere from time to time, in the midst of otherwise banal ones: The sitting room, in the daytime, once she peeled the curtains aside, seemed much less welcoming than at night.Clumsy phrasing, to be sure, and clumsy characterization and plotting as well. In addition, while the novel is set in the 1950s, and mentions of the Revolution (c. 1910-20) and its legacy are crucial to much of the plot, the action could be taking place in any time, in any place. The only grounding in the historical period are an over-emphasis on Noemí’s fashions, but perhaps this is also because High Place exists outside of time. For that, I will give the author at least some credit, though it’s unclear why the 1950s setting exists to begin with, since it isn’t really felt by the reader apart from the above mentioned descriptions of fashion or the sociocultural position of women.

I almost abandoned this at 70%, something I never do, but I kept plodding along, hoping that a truer Gothic plot would reveal itself; I ended up just flabbergasted and extremely disappointed. This will be the sort of book that some people love—the writing seems almost like it would suit YA audiences, but I’m not sure if that’s the intended demographic or not (something tells me no)—but I will definitely take a pass on this author’s previous (and future) books, and, unless you’re a fan of supernatural horror, I might urge you to do the same. It’s perhaps a good beach or airplane read, if nothing else.

Names can be deceiving, and, despite the lovely cover of the book, that hackneyed phrase rings true: don’t judge a book by its cover... or its title.

A classic Gothic horror novel set in 1950s Mexico, where a young woman answers the call for help from her newly married cousin, who lives in the countryside with her husband and his family. Dark secrets, bloody visions, and terrifying nightmares lurk behind the walls of this enigmatic house.

Undoubtedly, the setting is one of the things I liked most. A haunted mansion with a disconcerting environment and a cemetery that gave me goosebumps!

Another relevant point is the backdrop upon which the story is based: colonialism. Mexican culture of the time plays a significant role, and with it, the author exposes a strong critique of racism.

Something different from what I usually read, well-written, with a powerful female protagonist that provided me with good moments but didn't quite evoke terror; in my opinion, some of the scenes are somewhat fantastical.

Despite having good components, it didn't quite fascinate me, perhaps because as I read, I imagined it as one of those daytime TV movies. ? (Translated from Spanish)

A mystery novel that keeps you hooked the whole time, with very well-crafted descriptions of the house, the dreams, and some rather unpleasant moments. It also has some critiques regarding racism, classism, and machismo. In general, you want to reach the end to know what is happening in that house.

<> (Translated from Spanish)

What to do upon receiving a letter from your cousin who lives in a mansion in a frightening village? Should I go or not... that is the decision Noemí had to make about her cousin Catalina's letter... should I go or not? ?????

I started this story because the book cover is BEAUTIFUL and I couldn't resist starting it, blindly, not knowing what I would find... I continued accompanying the book with an audiobook which made the narration of the protagonist and her experiences more interesting.

There are scenes in the book that I still don’t understand and I don’t blame it, the narration is very much like a classic book and that’s not my strong suit, however, I love it. But the twist of the story surprised me more than I thought, I didn’t see everything that happens until the end coming.

It’s a book that starts slowly, introducing each of its imperfect and strange characters, but that family secret in High Place I think nobody saw coming. It caught me, it scared me, my heart raced with nerves and I breathed with relief, all in a single scene...

The walls of High Place have ears, they whisper and transport their guests to dark places, would you stay?

"In a sense, all dreams are predictions, although some are clearer than others."

"It’s another dream, it’s the darkness, and the darkness is not real..." (Translated from Spanish)