Mexican Gothic in Pick-a-Shelf

Mar 12, 2021 Paul Perry rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: female-protagonist, fiction, female-author, horror, gothic, post-colonialism, read-in-2021, mexican-author

While I liked a lot about this book, I was far from blown away by it. It is sold very much as a feminist and anti-colonial take on the Gothic and is that, but this is hardly groundbreaking. For the feminist slant Angela Carter, Joyce Carol Oates and Poppy Z. Brite do a wonderful job, and there are post-colonial Gothic traditions in much of the world, notably the Caribbean.

Not that something has to be groundbreakingly original - indeed, by definition hardly anything can be - and is not necessaril While I liked a lot about this book, I was far from blown away by it. It is sold very much as a feminist and anti-colonial take on the Gothic and is that, but this is hardly groundbreaking. For the feminist slant Angela Carter, Joyce Carol Oates and Poppy Z. Brite do a wonderful job, and there are post-colonial Gothic traditions in much of the world, notably the Caribbean.

Not that something has to be groundbreakingly original - indeed, by definition hardly anything can be - and is not necessarily a bar to quality. Moreno-Garcia's book takes some of the classic tropes from genre, that have held from Walpole to the Brontes to Dracula to B-movies, and places them in post-revolutionary 1930s Mexico.

Noemi, the free-spirited socialite daughter of an industrialist (check) is sent to look in on the health and well-being of her cousin, married to a mysterious Englishman (foreigner, check) in his family's isolated mansion in the mountains (check).

There she finds an oppressive, ghostly atmosphere (check), the house run by a strict, sour-faced aunt (check) and the mysterious patriarch, bed-bound by illness (check). And, of course, there are even more dark and malevolent goings on beneath the surface (check).

The author is good at some of this. She writes in a style that is pulpy without being too over the top, with good characterisation and the sense of place she evokes is wonderful. She also shows a great flair for suggesting and subverting some of the Gothic traditions mentioned above, and displaying the sense of nonchalant threat of the family's racism and misogyny. However, this is often spoilt by a heavy-handedness bordering on the amateurish. She will often construct a wonderful creepy and evocative image as a metaphor for the situation, and then immediately point out exactly what this is a metaphor for, utterly ruining it. This seems to happen far more in the later stages of the book, as both the tension and sense of oppression are increasing, and it is so clumsy that it has the effect of destroying the hard work she's done to achieve this. I find it astonishing that this got past an editor.

I have to also say that my enjoyment of the book was affected by the narrator of the audiobook. I suspect the narrator is not a native English speaker and read in a style that was both sing-song and robotic, as though she were reading directly from a script and not giving the correct emphasis to a sentence. She also had the tendency to breathily draw out random words, including almost every single word that fell at the end of a sentencccccce. I took a quick dislike to the reading and, while I managed to more-or-less come to turns the style, I was never comfortable with it.

So, Mexican Gothic is fine. I enjoyed it and would probably have enjoyed reading more than I did listening, although I'm not sure Moreno-Garcia is an author I would jump to read again without a very good reas0n. ...more

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