Book 7 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! Running a little behind but should be able to make it up pretty easily. As usual, my link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there.

Back in 2024, I read Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Gods of Jade and Shadow, a modern fairy tale set in the Jazz age of Mexico, and was charmed by its creativity. Moreno-Garcia is a Mexican-born Canadian writer and her works are steeped in Mexican culture and history, making them a wonderful departure for someone like me who is often reading works set in the United States.

A few weeks ago, I decided to check out Moreno-Garcia’s follow-up 2021 book Mexican Gothic, which as the title suggests is a gothic horror novel.

The book is a slow-burn of mystery and dread set in 1950s Mexico that builds to a genuinely horrific revelation!

Noemi Taboada is enjoying the life of a young debutante, attending parties in Mexico City and partaking in flirtatious dates with would-be suitors. She is torn away from her reverie by a frantic letter from her newly married cousin Catalina, who now lives with her husband and his family in the remote mansion known as High Place. Catalina’s letter speaks of ghosts and things in the walls and reads as the thoughts of someone who has lost their mind, a far cry from the happy young woman that Noemi knew only a year earlier. Noemi’s father asks her to investigate, so Noemi travels to High Place to assess Catalina’s condition and whether they should insist on more serious psychological treatment for her.

Noemi enters a grim household, led by the withered old patriarch Howard but managed by Catalina’s husband Virgil and his sister Florence. The routines are strict and joyless, including no speaking at dinner and only cold baths. The servants are mostly silent and the house itself is old and in a state of decay, with mold and fungus seeming to encroach on everything.

Noemi finds that her only friend in the house is Virgil’s son Francis, but he seems cowed by his father and life within the house. Noemi is only allowed short visits with her cousin and Catalina is kept quite sedated, supposedly as treatment for “tuberculosis.” And Noemi begins to have extremely vivid and dark dreams that suggest something even worse lurks within the house, as her cousin wrote.

But Noemi is not easily dissuaded, and she begins to probe deeper into the history of the house, the family, and her cousin’s malady. However, she does not realize that the family has its own plans for her, and her time is running out…

Mexican Gothic is a masterfully crafted gothic horror novel. We spend the first half of the novel getting to know the characters and their eccentricities and glimpsing hints of the secrets that has cursed the family for generations. In the second half of the novel, the horrors are revealed, and Noemi fights to survive and escape from a truly horrific fate.

The secrets at the heart of a Gothic novel can range from very earthly revelations of a family’s dark past all the way up to supernatural horrors lurking behind the scenes. Mexican Gothic introduces a very weird and unnatural horror at the root of everything going on, and it is a very satisfying revelation and also a lot of fun to look back at all the hints that were seeded earlier in the book.

This was one of those books that I had a hard time putting down once I started! Though it is a slow-burn in the first few chapters, I was quickly drawn into the story and it moves at a pace that kept me intrigued throughout. It was a great read and I look forward to reading more by Moreno-Garcia.