304 pages
Published 2020
Read from October 6 to October 9
Rating: 4 out of 5
I haven't dabbled much in the Gothic category before now. There was The Secret Skin, which was lovely and gay, a love-letter to the genre that refused its misogynistic roots. Before that there was Dunleary, which was godawful, seriously one of the worst books I've ever read. And long ago I read Jane Eyre (though none of the other foundational Gothic texts). I like the general aesthetic of the business, but haven't ever sought it out, unlike my partner R, who has a shelf full of tawdry old "woman stumbling away from a house" paperbacks and has begun to collect modern queer revisions of the genre as well.
Mexican Gothic is one of the best books I could add to this meagre list. It unfurls a world of decadence and decay, delightfully unsettling and fantastically rendered. The descriptions of place, the rotting edges of reality coming undone in a remote colonialist's manorhouse deep in the mountains, linger in the mind and the lungs. The buried family secrets, a requisite of the genre, are wonderfully morbid and imaginative.
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