Novel of the week Francesca Carington

Mexican Gothic, a fabulously fleshy Fifties Mexico-set horror story by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, begins with a letter summoning the heroine to a haunted hilltop mansion: “This house is sick with rot, stinks of decay, brims with every single evil and cruel sentiment…” Excellent stuff.

Our heroine is the feisty and adorable socialite Noemí, a keen anthropologist, but content to devote her time “to the twin pursuits of leisure and husband hunting”. When her father receives a disturbing letter from Noemí’s cousin Catalina, who’s recently married the eerily handsome Englishman Virgil Doyle, Noemí is sent to investigate. A checklist of scary-story conventions follow: the imperious female gatekeeper, the decrepit master of the house hidden away, the gruesome backstory shared by a local healer, the dark and sexy dreams that have Noemí waking up in odd parts of the house.

It’s formulaic, but no less successful for it. Moreno-Garcia veers at times towards the cinematic, with snapping twigs in cemeteries, hazy flashbacks and characters that speak and think in loaded aphorisms (“Was she seeing a pattern where there wasn’t any? After all, that’s what humans did: look for patterns”).

When it comes to the horror, though, Moreno-Garcia gets it absolutely right. There’s a mushroomy menace about the house that’s deliciously horrid, as well as more corporeal creeps (diseased limbs, walls like oozing sores) that go nicely with the bad guy’s preoccupation with eugenics, with “good” and “bad” bodies. Colonialism is a big theme: the English family who’ve ravaged the land and perverted indigenous rituals for their own nefarious ends, all the while obsessing about maintaining the bloodline, a Habsburgian look about them hinting at just how…

In all, it’s enormously fun – though the references to fairy tales and Gothic novels add an irritating self-awareness. Why send up conventions when they result in something this fun?