My Goodreads review: Mexican Gothic

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This one really is pretty much what it says on the cover: a Mexican Gothic. Gothic as in the dark, addictive (to the adolescent me, anyway) somewhat romantic novels of the 1960s & 1970s. Mexican as in del Toro movies, hallucinatory & imaginatively nightmarish.

The combination makes for an excellent late-summer page-turner (clicker?), though there's a bit of intellectual weight as well. Set in the 1950s, the novel includes multiple references to eugenics theories still current at the time. There is also the requisite creepy isolated house & grounds -- here inspired by an actual English mining area within Mexico -- scraps of anthropology from the heroine's reading, & more than anyone ought to know about fungi.

Most of this is discussed in a Goodreads interview with the author, which can be found here

https://www.goodreads.com/interviews/...

I found it added to my post-reading enjoyment, without being too spoiler-y for pre-readers.








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