Mexican Gothic

1950s Mexico City. Noemí Taboada is a glamorous socialite dispatched to a remote mansion in the mountains to rescue her cousin, who has written a desperate letter claiming her English husband's family is poisoning her. What Noemí finds at High Place is the Doyle family — English mine owners who have lived in Mexico for generations, extracting silver and labor from the surrounding Indigenous communities, and who have built something in the house that is older and more terrible than ordinary colonial violence. Moreno-Garcia is a Mexican author using the Gothic horror genre to say something about colonial extraction that documentary history cannot quite say in the same register: that what colonialism does to land and people leaves something in the physical world, something that doesn't decompose, something that reproduces itself through the bodies and minds of the people it captures. The house is the colony. The horror is the historical record. The most important Latin American horror novel since Mariana Enriquez and the one that most completely uses genre to make a structural argument about power.