What is Mexican Gothic about?

Mexican Gothic is set in 1950s Mexico, where Noemí Taboada — fashionable, sharp, and underestimated — travels to a remote manor in the Mexican countryside after receiving a disturbing letter from her newly-married cousin Catalina. The letter describes visions, threats, and a creeping dread. What Noemí finds at High Place is the Doyle family: English mining colonizers who have settled in Hidalgo, grown wealthy on silver extraction, and built themselves a rotting mansion full of secrets. Something in the house — something biological and ancient — is feeding on the women inside it.

Moreno-Garcia is interested in what gothic horror looks like when you filter it through Mexican history and the indigenous-colonialist relationship. The Doyles aren't just creepy aristocrats; they're eugenicists who have been conducting experiments in racial "improvement" using the indigenous population as raw material. The horror of the house is not supernatural in an arbitrary sense — it grows directly from the colonial project. The rot and the mold and the violence are what extraction and domination produce. This is what makes the book more than a competent haunted-house novel.

Stylistically, Moreno-Garcia draws on the classic Gothic tradition — Rebecca, The Turn of the Screw, the whole canon of threatening houses and menaced women — but Noemí is not passive. She investigates, argues, refuses, and fights back in ways that feel like a deliberate revision of the genre's usual treatment of its heroines. The prose is precise and controlled, and the house's biology — I'll say no more without spoilers — is genuinely original.

Horror readers and fans of gothic fiction will find this satisfying. Readers who want a fast thriller may feel the first half is slow. Those looking for something that is purely escapist should know that the book's colonial politics are inseparable from its horror logic — this is not a story about random evil, but about a specific, historically grounded one.