Mexican Gothic (2020) is a novel that I cannot recommend. But don’t take my word for it. Google the title and you’ll find dozens of positive reviews comparing Moreno-Garcia’s mystery to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) Jane Eyre 1943 film version and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) Rebecca 1940 film version. Heavy hitters in their own right, I recognized the connections in Gothic, but making those connections set me up for what Vincent Vega, from Pulp Fiction, might call “a bold statement.” The hype didn’t live up to the reality.
At the center of this trio of novels are naïve young women: Jane Eyre, the second Mrs. de Winter from Rebecca, and Gothic’s Noemi Taboada. An enigmatic love interest, a house with secrets, and croney female characters who trouble the heroines are obvious connections, too. But what Bronte and du Maurier do well, Moreno-Garcia falls short. To wit, Bronte layers her gothic story with enough background that the reader understands Jane’s motivations. That Jane falls in love with an older man whose insane wife lives in the attic is disconcerting, but the heart wants what the heart wants, right? And Bronte offers Rochester, Jane’s married man, an out: disinherited by his father, he marries Betha Mason for her money. Poor guy. Marry Bertha or work for a living. He chose the former, and then stuck his insane, beautiful, wealthy, Jamaican wife in the attic of Thornfield Hall. Gothic’s Virgil Doyle marries once-fun-loving Catalina, Noemi’s cousin, who fears that her new home, High Place, is trying to kill her. Sneaking a letter addressed to Noemi’s dad, the reader learns of Catalina’s possible insanity as the walls whisper sweet nothings, no, sorry, nothing sweet about these nothings. Here is what deranged Catalina claims, “The walls speak to me. They tell me secrets. Don’t listen to them, press your hands against your ears, Noemi. There are ghosts.” She’s half right. What speaks to her is the Gloom, which is a combination of a fungus (I explain the fungus in three more sentences. Be patient, dear reader.) which grows beneath the house and her father-in-law’s first wife, Agnes. Yes, it’s a spoiler. You’ll be glad I explained “the gloom” if you read the book. Revealing the conflict between Virgil and Catalina will ruin the reveal of the novel, and I’m going to do it anyway. Akin to “The Last of Us,” the television series on HBOMax based on the video game, the (dead) characters in Gothic are interconnected via a deadly fungus that alters the minds of the inhabitants of, wait for it: High Place. Get it? Mushrooms? High Place? Oh boy. And Noemi as the beautiful feminist character who flirts with young men in Mexico City, dresses like a fashion model, and agrees to rescue her cousin if her dad will allow her to major in anthropology is a letdown. Her dad doesn’t understand why a 1950s young lady desires an education when her job is to secure a husband. At least Noemi has a name! Rebecca’s naïve heroine is known only as the second Mrs. de Winter. This waif of a woman is overshadowed by the book’s title character, Rebecca, who is dead. (Sidebar: Do check out the Alfred Hitchcock Rebecca 1940 film version. Classic suspenseful Hitch.) So, there’s the thread, or fungus, that connects the novels: naïve young women eclipsed by dead or hidden women.
But the book does work on another level that is timely. The fungus that infects the characters reminds me of COVID-19. The novel was published in 2020, and although Moreno-Garcia hasn’t claimed any allegorical connections to the pandemic, I see them. High Place’s rural setting is the quarantined house where readers hunkered down in 2020. The characters don’t interact with townspeople; they distrust those outside of their bubble, and they are infected by a scary and deadly virus when they go outside their bubble for toilet paper, scratch that, hand sanitizer, scratch that, canned soup. Okay: candy, chips, and alcohol.
But Moreno-Garcia could’ve told the story of a forward-thinking heroine. Noemi Taboada, a university student who wants to study anthropology, which is the “study of human societies and culture and their development,” and the “study of human biological and physiological characteristics and their evolution,” might’ve begun her university studies at High Place, a unique quarantined, gothic house to analyze and investigate the evolution of her cousin’s bonkers family. Now that’s a novel (pun intended) idea! Instead, she falls in love with a fungus brother, Francis, and vows to cure him after they burn High Place to the ground. I seem to recall a couple of gothic novels where the heroine sets fire to scary, gothicy mansions. Guess what happens at the end of Jane Eyre? Thornfield Hall burns; insane wife dies. Guess what happens at the end of Rebecca? Manderley burns; the memory of the cruel wife dies.
Not interested in reading the novel? In August 2020 Milojo Productions and ABC Signature announced that they had optioned a limited series adaptation of Mexican Gothic to be released on HULU. Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos are producing, and Ripa feels like “we [she and Consuelos] hit the literary jackpot.” And she loves the author’s writing: “Sublime horror for your summer reading. So good i [sic] bought the hard copy and the download to read in the dark.” I suspect her hubby didn’t join her in the dark.
But, dear reader, pick up Mexican Gothic if you like derivative gothic stories. This blog is one reader’s humble opinion, not a “bold statement.”
Mexican Gothic by
Jane Eyre by
Rebecca by