Mexican Gothic

Mexican Gothic is a feminist Gothic novel by Mexican writer Silvia Moreno-Garcia, who currently resides in Canada. Set in 1950s Mexico City and the burned-out mining town of El Triunfo, the novel is a horror-tinged thriller in which Noemí Taboada, a socialite with aspirations to become an anthropologist, goes to El Triunfo to rescue her cousin Catalina from the Doyles. The Doyles are an impoverished family of English silver barons who have united with a sentient fungus to ensure immortality for the family’s patriarch, Howard Doyle. The novel has garnered critical praise for Moreno-Garcia, a past winner of the World Fantasy Award and finalist for the Aurora, British Fantasy, Nebula, and Locus awards. This guide is based on the 2020 Del Rey print edition.

Content Warning: The source text includes references to sexual assault and rape, which are discussed in this guide.

Plot Summary

At her father’s behest, Noemí Taboada goes to High Place, the country estate of the Doyles, to assist Catalina, a Taboada cousin who has written to Noemí’s father requesting help in escaping from her in-laws, the Doyles, and their house, which she claims is haunted. When Noemí arrives at the house, the family treats her poorly. Florence Doyle, the niece of patriarch Howard, is cold. Howard, a bad-smelling and very elderly man, makes passes at and shares his racist eugenics theories with Noemí. Noemí instantly falls into conflict with Catalina’s husband Virgil, the Doyle heir, over her desire to have Catalina evaluated by a psychiatrist, though Virgil grudgingly agrees to her demands. However, Noemí does find kindness and companionship in Francis, Florence’s son.

Over the next week, Noemí learns more about the tragic history of the Doyles, who came to Mexico from England in 1885 to revive their fortunes as silver mine owners. Floods, worker strikes, two waves of a mysterious illness that killed many of their workers, and the Mexican Revolution at the start of the 1900s ruined them. Noemí also learns from Marta Duval, a healer in town, that Ruth, Howard’s daughter, killed all the Doyles except for Virgil (then a baby), Florence, and Howard, whom she wounded. Ruth killed her family rather than marry her first cousin. Marta warns Noemí that the Doyles and High Place are spiritually corrupt and haunted by a supernatural evil. Noemí should leave. Francis tells her much the same when she confronts him with Ruth’s story.

Meanwhile, Noemí begins having increasingly bizarre dreams and hallucinations in which the house is alive, Howard and Virgil sexually assault her, and a spectral Ruth tries to reveal some terrible truth about the Doyles to Noemí. Noemí begins sleepwalking and even ends up in Virgil’s room one night wearing almost nothing, much to Virgil’s pleasure.

Eager to help her cousin, who is a shadow of her former self, Noemí secures a tincture from Marta Duval, who claims the tincture will heal Catalina. It doesn’t. Noemí loses confidence in her plan to help her cousin. Noemí’s own sanity continues to unravel. She eventually decides that she should leave and enlist her father to help rescue her cousin, but her plan to leave fails.

On what is supposed to be Noemí’s last night at High Place, the family reveals what Howard really is. Howard is an old creature who started out as a man 300 years ago. Deathly ill, Howard went to a tribe of people who worshiped using a golden mushroom that granted long life to those it did not kill. Something about Howard’s makeup allows him to exist symbiotically with the mushroom. Howard sacrifices several women (including his sister/wife) to create the gloom, an entity that holds all the Doyle memories, controls anyone who enters High Place, and allows Howard to transmigrate to the body of another Doyle man once his grows too old and corrupt.

Ever since then, the Doyles have married brothers, sisters, and other first-degree relatives to ensure their blood purity. Because Ruth refused to marry her family members, the Doyles need Noemí and Catalina to reinvigorate their line. Howard attempts to force Noemí to marry Francis, but Virgil, who wants to take over the family, subverts this plan by allowing Francis, Catalina, and Noemí to kill Howard before the transmigration can take place. Noemí destroys the gloom, burns High Place, and rescues Catalina and Francis. The novel closes with her decision to risk the spread of the golden mushroom to pursue love with Francis.