MEXICAN GOTHIC

RELEASED 30 JUNE 299 pages | Hardback/ebook Author Silvia Moreno-Garcia Publisher Del Rey

There are shades of Daphne du Maurier in this twisty little gothic novel, which pits a young woman against the horrors of a crumbling ancestral home.

Our heroine is Noemí, a flirty young socialite who arrives at a secluded mansion in the Mexican countryside, after receiving a disturbing letter from her cousin saying that her new husband is trying to poison and kill her.

So far, so very traditional. But dark treasures glimmer beneath the seemingly mundane. Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s setting is beautifully evocative; the gothic novel is a genre associated with dank and dark locales in stormy European landscapes, but setting it in Mexico instead gives the story a lush, heated shimmer all its own.

It’s also a deeply creepy read, unwinding in a house so entrenched in its own restrictive rules that you can hardly breathe. No talking at dinner; no driving into town; no hot water for your bath; no smoking. Noemí must learn to navigate these strange rituals, while unravelling the mystery of the ghosts shrieking in the walls and the fractured psyche of her cousin-in-law.

And while the reveal can often be disappointing in a horror novel that creeps up to a grand finale in this way, here everything builds to a strange, pulsing, psychedelic ending that feels much more like the work of Jeff VanderMeer than Charlotte Brontë.