I've read and enjoyed a couple of other books by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, a Mexican author currently living in Canada, but I hadn't picked up a copy of her most lauded novel until now. It was published in 2020, so comes after 'Gods of Jade and Shadow' but before 'The Daughter of Doctor Moreau'; it bears much more similarities to the latter because it's less interested in immersing us in Mexican culture and more in freeing it from the colonial yoke.

It does a wonderful job at that and I adored the way that the old world giving way to the new was echoed in the choice of genres. As the title suggests, this is a gothic, which is a quintessentially old world genre, and Moreno-Garcia adapts it impeccably to the Mexican countryside, bringing layers of old world privilege and class with it. However, it also grows steadily into weird fiction and, as it progresses, body horror, and, while they're not purely new world genres, that's what most people see them as now. I hadn't realised until now, but Moreno-Garcia is the publisher behind Innsmouth Free Press and has edited a number of Lovecraftian anthologies.

Initially, of course, this is clearly gothic, merely transplanted to Mexico, as far as to begin with the traditional letter. Catalina Tabaoda married Virgil Doyle after a whirlwind romance and moved to his family's mansion in the countryside. However, she feels that she's going mad, due to suspected poisoning, so she writes a frantic note to her beloved cousin, Noemí, for help. Noemí is young, just twenty-two, and a socialite enjoying the bright lights of Mexico City, but her father requires that she catch the train to El Triunfo to visit and find out what's going on.

The Doyle's mansion is called High Place and it's built on top of the family's silver mine. It's about as gothic as it gets, not merely a vast and Victorian building but an oppressive character all on its own. To extend that further, it's a dying character, riddled with mould, which is in the walls and in the books. Everything the Doyles touch rots and we can feel the tainted air from moment one as if we're breathing it ourselves. Of course, the family and the house are cursed, because every gothic must have a curse, but Noemí has to uncover what that truly means.

She's officially made welcome, because society demands courtesy, but it's clear that she isn't; only Catalina, practically locked away in her upstairs room, is truly eager to see her. However, she's so ill, supposedly of consumption, that contact is strictly limited—for Catalina's benefit, you understand—and so Noemí finds that she has plenty of time on her hands to dig into what's going on. That's a tricky process, because the family are notably controlling and do everything they can to keep her from visiting the local town.

The characters very deliberately start out as archetypes, but grow as Moreno-Garcia explores the weird fiction story behind the gothic. There are reasons for everything here, even archetype. The patriarch of the family is Uncle Howard, Virgil's father, who's ridiculously old but on death's door. He's suffering from a horrible disease that contributes a morbid soundtrack to this old dark house. We're never in doubt that he's in charge, even if he's frequently bedridden. It would be easy to set him aside as a character because of his condition but we don't because he's simply dominant, as a devout eugenicist rather has to be.

Florence runs the place as a taciturn Victorian shadow, the enforcer of rules to preserve precisely what she wants (or what Uncle Howard wants) and prohibit absolutely anything else. Virgil shows his seductive side often, not just to highlight why Catalina fell for him so quickly but also as a clear invitation for Noemí to do the same, which starts out inappropriate and goes a long way beyond. That leaves Florence's son, Francis, who's around Noemí's age so an adult but still the only young person in the household. He's as weak and subservient as a son of his mother is doomed to be.

All of them are also stunningly pale, which led me to a false assumption. This is a horror novel and pale skin, dark wine and hypnotic stares smacks very much of vampires, which is hardly an unusual choice for a gothic. When Noemí starts to experience weird dreams, sleepwalk and heal wounds in far too short a time, that almost seemed guaranteed, but it's not where this is going, even though it would also play into the underlying theme of colonialism. There are reasons for everything here, as I mentioned, and Moreno-Garcia fits every puzzle piece together perfectly.

Initially, I felt that this was oddly lacking in Mexican culture. 'Gods of Jade and Shadow' is a romp through Mayan culture and religion that trawls in actual deities to be characters. Here, we rarely even meet a Mexican, beyond the two Tabaoda girls, because as much as we're in Mexico, it's kept firmly on the other side of the locked doors of High Place. The Doyle family is English and it's been here for generations, but none of them even speak Spanish. It's telling that the few Mexicans we do meet, not least Noemí and Catalina, are bilingual.

Before long, of course, I realised that this was very deliberate. The Doyles are there not just to be the cursed gothic family in the cursed gothic mansion, they're there to be an enclave of a colonial occupier that sees itself as superior to the local peasantry. That's underlined by Uncle Howard's obsession with eugenics, though he's not averse to spicing up their genes with fiery Latin blood. In a controlled manner, of course. There's subtext all over this book, about what the Doyles mean to the town of El Triunfo and vice versa, not just in how they've exploited the locals but also how the locals have allowed that exploitation to be perpetuated. Noemí isn't just Mexican, she's from the city and a whole new generation.

I liked this a lot and I can see why it made the Books of Horror Go To List. It doesn't have the verve of 'Gods of Jade and Shadow' but it shouldn't ever have had. It has the social commentary of 'The Daughter of Doctor Moreau' but goes much deeper. And, were this only a Mexican gothic, I could praise it as the best of the three. However, it isn't. It's also weird fiction and that's where it really got its teeth into me. I love gothics and all the opportunity they bring to play with mood, but I also love weird fiction and merging the two like this is glorious. Taking that deep into body horror was not something I expected and there are obvious clashes, but then that's the point. It worked like a charm. So yes, this is easily the best of the three and I liked the other two. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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