I’ve definitely said phrases like “I don’t like horror” before, but I’m probably wrong because, like every other gothic novel about women and haunting and houses (thanks Dr. Auerbach!), I loved it.
There are books that are hard to put down in the sense that stuff keeps happening and so you have to keep reading. And then there are books that feel more inexorable. You put them down to do something else and then, five minutes later, you’re reading again and pulled back in. Mexican Gothic is like that. Moreno-Garcia knows her genre well and, in particular, knows how to leverage familiar tropes to tell a new story steeped in its own atmosphere and one that, in its extremely deliberate use of setting and character, takes the traditional horror of the foreigner and outsider that drives so much of the gothic, and puts it to spectacular good use.