Mexican Gothic

In 1950s Mexico City, Noemi Taboada, a socialite studying anthropology, is sent by her father to the remote mountain town of El Triunfo after her newly married cousin Catalina writes a disturbing letter accusing her husband Virgil Doyle of poisoning her. At High Place, the Doyles' decaying English built mansion, Noemi meets the family's ancient patriarch Howard Doyle, his cold daughter Florence, and Virgil's gentler cousin Francis, and finds Catalina genuinely unwell, sedated by a local healer and increasingly convinced the house itself is alive. Noemi begins experiencing disturbing dreams and sleepwalking episodes of her own, and her investigation slowly uncovers that the Doyle family's wealth and unnatural longevity depend on a symbiotic fungus bound to the house and to the buried remains of Howard's dead wife Agnes, whose consciousness the family has kept alive and entangled with the mansion for generations. Howard reveals he intends to marry Noemi himself, in order to use her body and her family's bloodline to keep the fungal colony, and his own life, going. With Francis's help, Noemi and Catalina finally escape, destroying Agnes's remains and burning the house down around what remains of the Doyle family, though Francis, even in the moment of escape, fears the fungus may have already spread its spores somewhere he cannot see. Underneath the horror, the novel keeps returning to a real historical fact: High Place was built as a British owned silver mine that ran on the forced labor of Indigenous and Mexican workers after Mexico's own war of independence, and the Doyles' predatory hunger for Noemi's body and blood is written as a direct continuation of that colonial exploitation rather than a separate horror layered on top of it.

Moreno-Garcia builds dread slowly through a genuinely haunted mansion, sleepwalking, body possession, and a family history soaked in incest and violence, and reviewers repeatedly reached for the classic gothic touchstones it plainly invites, Jane Eyre, Rebecca, Dracula, while noting how deliberately its colonial backstory sets it apart from those novels' Englishness; it reads slowly and atmospherically at first before accelerating hard once Noemi understands what the house actually is.