Mexican Gothic
SynopsisPlot
After receiving a frantic letter from her newly-wed cousin begging for someone to save her from a mysterious doom, Noemí Taboada heads to High Place, a distant house in the Mexican countryside. She’s not sure what she will find—her cousin’s husband, a handsome Englishman, is a stranger, and Noemí knows little about the region.
Story
About this book
Set in 1950s Mexico, Mexican Gothic follows Noemí Taboada, a young socialite from Mexico City who travels to a remote countryside mansion called High Place after receiving a desperate letter from her recently married cousin. The cousin, now living with her English husband and his family, pleads for rescue from something she struggles to explain. Noemí arrives expecting a short visit but finds a household governed by strange rules and an aging patriarch whose interest in her feels uncomfortably pointed.
Noemí is fashionable and socially confident, more familiar with cocktail parties than rural isolation. She is also sharp and stubborn, qualities that serve her as the house and its residents grow more unsettling. Her sleep is disturbed by vivid, disturbing dreams, and the mansion itself seems to press against her resolve. Her one potential ally inside the family is its youngest son, who appears sympathetic but whose own loyalties remain unclear.
The novel draws on gothic literary traditions and relocates them to a Mexican setting shaped by a former mining fortune and its colonial English owners. Silvia Moreno-Garcia builds the story around the tension between Noemí's determination to understand what is happening and a household that resists outside scrutiny at every turn.
