I just can’t get over how gorgeous the cover for this book is! It immediately caught my attention when it was on display in the window of my local indie bookstore, and that alone made me want to read it (also the title is pretty intriguing). I had no idea until someone pointed it out to me that the author, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, had also written Gods of Jade and Shadow, which I’ve also been meaning to read, but have yet to get around to.
I requested the audiobook of Mexican Gothic from my local library back in October when I was immersing myself in spooky fiction, but there was such a backlog that it took until December for my hold to come in. The book was definitely worth the wait, but I was underwhelmed by the narrator. She had a tendency to over enunciate and she put the same lilt at the end of every sentence, so it sounded very monotonous.
That said, the story is phenomenal, so I highly recommend you read a physical copy or ecopy over listening to the audiobook.
The book takes place in Mexico in 1950 and is told in first-person POV from the perspective of Noemi Taboada, a socialite living in Mexico City. We first meet her having a conversation in her father’s office after he’s summoned her home early from a party because he’s received a very disturbing letter from Noemi’s cousin, Catalina.
Catalina had recently married an Englishman who lives on the outskirts of a small town called El Triunfo. Her new husband, Virgil Doyle, is heir to the family estate, High Place, which was built near a silver mine that provided the Doyle family fortune, but the silver mine has since dried up, and the family’s fortune is dwindling. Noemi’s father disapproved of the marriage because he suspected Virgil only wanted to marry Catalina for her money. Now he wants to send Noemi to check on her cousin.
SPOILER ALERT! The following review contains significant spoilers for the plot of this book, so if you have yet to read it and you don’t want anything spoiled for you, I suggest you stop reading here and go read the book.
So Noemi trucks out there and finds a crumbling mansion that only has electricity in a few rooms and still relies heavily on candles and oil lamps for illumination. All the books in the library are rotting and full of mold, and a disturbingly large number of them are on eugenics.
Catalina is too sick to leave her bedroom, and while she mostly seems lucid when Noemi visits her, she also says weird things, like claiming the walls are listening.
Catalina’s new father-in-law, Howard, is also sick, which is to be expected for someone who’s 90 years old, give or take. He manages to join them in the dining room for Noemi’s first evening in High Place, although he doesn’t eat anything. I’m always suspicious of characters we don’t see eating in horror fiction. For some reason, my mind went immediately to “he’s a vampire!” As it turns out, I wasn’t entirely wrong.
In her first days at High Place, Noemi is told her cousin has tuberculosis, but the English doctor hired by the Doyles is vague on the details and treatment, so Noemi insists on getting a second opinion from a local doctor. He’s unable to offer much help, but Catalina does manage to ask Noemi for a certain tincture made by a local medicine woman.
Noemi fetches it for her, thinking it’s something to help Catalina sleep. The medicine woman tells Noemi just a spoonful before bed should do it, but as soon as Catalina gets her hands on it, she throws it back in one go and immediately has a seizure. She survives, but the Doyles accuse Noemi of giving Catalina opium – enough to nearly cause an overdose. Noemi had no idea what was in the tincture, but if Catalina asked for opium and promptly overdosed, it suggests she’s suicidal, which Noemi flatly refuses to believe. When she tells the local doctor about it (I forget his name), he points out that the medicine woman uses only local herbs and plants. Since opium isn’t native to Mexico, it doesn’t make any sense that she would have made a tincture containing opium.
In addition to worrying about her cousin, Noemi starts having very strange dreams, including an out-of-body experience in which she looks down on her own body lying in bed while Virgil undresses her and a voice in her ear tells her to open her eyes. By the time she manages to do so, she’s alone, but the blankets are no longer covering her body.
Another incident in the bathroom is even creepier when Virgil walks in on her while she’s in the bath. She has every intention of reprimanding him until she doesn’t and even responds to his touch when he starts kissing and caressing her. Again, that voice in her ear tells her to open her eyes, but her eyes are already open.
After a while she does manage to open her eyes, only to find herself in her bathrobe in Virgil’s bedroom with Virgil claiming she sleepwalked into his room, which she finds hard to believe, since she hasn’t sleepwalked since she was a child. In any case, she manages to convince herself the incident in the bathroom was a dream, despite the knowing smirks Virgil keeps giving her.
This mind-control-type seduction is very old-school vampire mythology and I am here for it!
It takes a while for the full story to come to light, so I’ll fast forward. Howard is at least 300 years old. He found a way to live forever using a magic mushroom that he managed to get into his bloodstream through a ritual conducted by some of the locals who mistook Doyle for a god. In true white-dude fashion, he took what he wanted from them and then burned them alive.
The mushroom is in the foundation of High Place, seeping into the walls and affecting everyone there. The longer you stay there, the more powerful its effect on you, but it is only in the bloodstream of the Doyles, and each time Howard wears out a body, he can live on by taking over the body of one of his sons, but he needs the new host body to have the magic mushroom in their blood, so they’re interbred to the max. And I do mean to the max, because the family has gone sterile.
The reason Virgil married Catalina (in addition to her money) was because he found out she was compatible with the fungus. Most people who come into contact with it for an extended period of time die, but Catalina and Noemi both appear to be strong enough to handle it, although that also means they’re strong enough to resist it … up to a point. Catalina had resisted it enough to get the letter to Noemi’s father, but she was unable to escape before the Doyles found out what she had done, at which point they locked her up.
When Noemi announces she’s ready to leave, they respond by bringing her to Howard’s bed and holding her in place while the dying man kisses her and spits into her mouth, thereby infecting her with the fungus and trapping her at High Place with them (having the fungus in their bloodstream means they’re unable to leave the grounds on which the fungus grows).
The Doyles come up with a plan to marry Noemi off to Francis, who’s either Virgil’s brother or cousin, I can’t remember which. She liked Francis up to this point, but her feelings quickly change when she realizes he was part of all this all along. Fortunately, Francis has also developed feelings for her, and those feelings have led him to renounce his family and help Noemi escape.
Things don’t go quite as planned, but they do manage to escape and burn High Place down on their way out. Given that vampires are exceptionally hard to kill, they’re not sure even that was enough to finish off the Doyles. The good news is Francis made it out with them and he and Noemi get to live happily ever after.