Growing up, I spent a lot of summers with my extended family in Panama. The months my brother and I were not in school were also the rainy season in the tropical climate, so much of my time was spent reading. My favorite kind of books were the ones that made me feel cold, or frightened, or in an otherworldly place. In Chiriquí, with the rain pattering on the roof of my abuela’s patio, or when we went to the ocean on a sunny day, I loved a ‘beach read’ that I could get lost in—but not too lost; I needed to be able to look up and know I wasn’t in Hannibal Lecter’s cell or in the house with rooms that were bigger inside than outside. I love a book I have to set aside at climactic moments in order to calm my heart rate; I tend to get enveloped by a good book’s atmosphere. I love that feeling, and my nostalgia for it was gleefully awoken by Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic.

In 1950s Mexico, we meet Noemí Taboada, a college student from a well-to-do family with a bubbling social life. She’s electric as soon as she’s introduced, exiting a costume party with her handsome date, and dismissing him easily though she knows he’s a catch. She’s got bigger things on her mind than courtship, and it mainly has to do with convincing her father that she should get her masters degree in anthropology. Her father says he will allow her to continue her schooling (though he wants her to marry), if she investigates why he’s been receiving ominous letters from her cousin Catalina, recently married to a British man in the Mexican countryside.

Noemí’s sparkling demeanor and wit is the perfect contrast to what she finds in her cousin’s dark and gloomy family home. It’s a huge house elevated on a rocky mountainside. When Noemí arrives, not only is there something amiss with Catalina (she’s sickly and must rest constantly), but the whole extended family of in-laws she lives with feel as damp and moldy as the house is described. The Doyles are an old British mining family, purveyors of a long since closed silver mine. Her introduction their house, named High Place:

“The house loomed over them like a great, quiet gargoyle. It might have been foreboding, evoking images of ghosts and haunted places, if it had not seemed so tired, slats missing from a couple of shutters, the ebony porch groaning as they made their way up the steps to the door, which came complete with a silver knocker shaped like a fist dangling from a circle.”

High Place seems like a character itself, a rundown Manderley in the gothic tradition, but Noemí is nothing like du Maurier’s meek narrator. Noemí is the light in a house that has no electricity, and in my mind her beautiful dresses and jewelry popped against the faded wallpaper as she walked through the eerie house. Moreno-Garcia’s descriptions have the power to evoke such cinematic imagery—and her words will put a spell on you.

Read the rest of the review on The Book Slut !