Cannonball Read 13

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An excellent book but not my cup of tea

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

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I read Gods of Jade and Shadow and thought it was enjoyable, so I was excited to read Mexican Gothic.  I’m not sure my expectations were met.

Noemi is a socialite in the upper-class of 1950s Mexico City. She goes to parties, she flirts, she wears beautiful gowns because she actually enjoys them, and she wants to go university against her family’s wishes. Noemi’s life gets upended when her father asks her to go check on her cousin Catalina who has written a strange and disturbing letter to the family. So in exchange for being allowed to attend the university of her choosing, Noemi goes to High Place in the Mexican countryside, the family home of Catalina’s English husband’s family to make sure that she is okay. She is not okay. In fact, nothing in High Place seems to be. The walls are damp. The Doyles, Catalina’s husband’s family, are believers in eugenics. And there’s a haunting force that visits Noemi in her dreams. Not entirely sure what is going on, Noemi does know that she has to get herself and her cousin out of that house, but the house has other plans.

I really enjoyed the themes of this book. Moreno-Garcia does not shy away from discussion of colorism, racism, colonialism, and eugenics. She doesn’t code the language from any of the characters which I appreciated. The Doyles, white and wealthy Englishmen, truly seem themselves as the pinnacle form of humanity in the town despite all evidence to the contrary. They cannot see the disparity between their sense of self and worth and the reality of their crumbling house, wealth, and health. It is infuriating.

Noemi, on the other hand, is wonderful. She is self-assured and self-aware. She knows what is expected of her in the world, and she uses that expectation as a weapon. She is clever and stalwart. She’s a respected socialite and an aspiring academic, and she wants to be both. There’s no dichotomy between the two. She has aspirations outside of what is expected of her class and gender.

Despite all of these positives, I did not like this book. I don’t think that it has anything to do with writing or plot or anything that Moreno-Garcia did; this book has cemented that I am not a fan of gothic novels. I enjoyed the light body horror in Mexican Gothic, but I wanted more. A spooky atmosphere and a sinister plot (which Moreno-Garcia was highly successful in creating) just isn’t enough for me in a novel.

My score: 2/5
If you enjoy gothic novels: 4 or 5/5

A compelling mystery, an intrepid heroine, a musty creepy mansion… and colonialism

Mexican Gothic by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia

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The book opens up from the perspective of a boy out on a party with a flighty, superficial and possibly spoiled socialite.  I think this was intentional on the part of the author.  A party girl is not what we expect to be a heroine of a story, much less a horror one.  Noemi Taboada is a lovely heroine. Unusual in that she is smart and strong (as most heroines are) but also flighty, stubborn and a socialite who enjoys going to parties and flirting with boys (which most heroines are not).
Noemi is living the good life in 1950s Mexico.  Sure, going to parties and enjoying life but also trying to find meaning and something that fulfills her, hence constantly shifting disciplines.  Her father convinces her (through a promise of higher education) to check on her close cousin Catalina’s  who had been recently married.  Catalina had sent an unhinged letter and was thought to be sick
So she travels to the High Place, the grand mansion owned by the Doyle family, where Cataline lives with her English husband, Virgil and his family.  The family is just the patriarch, Howard Doyle, the aunt, Florence and the nephew Francis.  High Place is in a remote and mountainous region of  Mexico where there used to be silver mined by the Doyle family.  But various tragedies and sicknesses has stopped mine operations and there is now just a poor, sad town and the desolate and damp mansion.
Of course, things get weird.  Who are Noemi’s allies?  What the hell is wrong with Catalina?  Why is Howard Doyle so gross?  Are things really happening or is Noemi going crazy?  At various times in the book I guessed that it was all hallucinations from mold, or that they were vampires, or that it was all a misunderstanding.  The real answer is way  weirder but also satisfying.  It is not afraid to delve into the supernatural.
Throughout the book, there are themes of colonialism, eugenics and fetishization of dark bodies.  Noemi is a privileged young lady, no doubt being born rich., but to the white Englishman Howard Doyle, she was still brown and lesser.  It goes hand in hand with how women, even white women are treated as disposable and mere carriers of babies. I found it fascinating that the book shows how rot and stagnation manifests when old money and whiteness is maintained.  Speaking of rot, there is a some gross body horror, not too much but enough for me, thank you, so be warned.
So I really liked it.  The first part is a slow burn but I enjoy how we get to know Noemi.  Like I said, I loved her.  There is also a bit of a subdued love story which I found simultaneously sweet (because I love pale troubled boys) and also uncomfortable and foreboding, especially during the ending  (or maybe I’m just pessimistic).

if it feels too good to be true…

The Whispering House by Elizabeth Brooks

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THEN IT IS! RUN!

Freya, our protagonist, is a willfully clueless horror heroine. Were The Whispering House a movie, we would all be shouting at her every time she was on screen. Don’t open that door! Don’t drink that tea! Don’t go up those stairs! Don’t look behind you! Don’t move in to the crumbling manor house that is somehow connected to your sister’s suicide days after meeting the charming yet off-putting man of the house! Just…DON’T!

A blurb on the cover of my ARC states that this book will keep the reader up at night…well, boo to you blurb, because I read it in one sitting! I couldn’t spend the night fretting and jumping at every creak and moan of my own old house because I ripped through this book and slammed hard into the mostly-satisfying ending. Take that, suspense! Not that this book is not suspenseful- it was just too compelling to ever put down. I needed to know how Freya was going to dig herself out of the black hole of Byrne Hall.

Like many modern gothic horror entries, most of the “gothic” comes from the atmosphere: a manor home in poor repair, brooding cliffside walks, unstable artists- the whole shebang. Byrne Hall is a crumbling home inhabited by a crumbling family. Eyes in cobwebbed portraits seem to follow. The walls whisper. The gate is wrought iron. The statues are missing heads. The horror, though, is far more insidious but also much more real.

The horror of The Whispering House is the horror of domestic abuse. This may be a difficult read for those who have experienced abuse themselves, or have lost others the powerful undertow of those who abuse. The early signs bleed through the page far before any actual blood starts flowing. As a reader I felt both helpless and enraged. I had to rip through this book as I had to see if Freya was going to continue to keep falling.

There’s nothing new about this story- being that is both a gothic homage and a portrait of endlessly repeating patterns of domestic abuse- but it’s a competent little thriller. It could have used a bit more breathing room to expand on some forced character connections, and some bits were almost too predictable, but if you’re looking for a spooky way to kill a Sunday then The Whispering House may be the book for you.

I received this ARC from the Tin House in exchange for a fair and honest review

Dracula sucks…but the book doesn’t!

Dracula by Bram Stoker

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Dracula sucks but the book doesn’t. Dracula book cover

I go through phases of reading classics or otherwise tackling books with reputations of being difficult. Sometimes it’s easy to see why books are classics – they’re timeless and engrossing. A Tale of Two Cities is that way for me. So is Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Other times the classics feel like archaeological work. The reader is excavating and extrapolating. Dracula felt like work to me, but the reader can definitely appreciate the book’s influence on future work. In particular, the book contains real stakes (STAKES!) and real horror, in the sense that things we would never want to happen…happen. It’s great at dread. Two or three scenes in particular stuck with me. One involves a cemetery and one involves a ghost ship. If you like cemeteries and ghost ships, maybe this book is for you!

I will admit that most of what I know about Dracula comes from the movie starring Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder (my two spirit animals). In the movie, Mr Harker (Keanu) is a young attorney sent on assignment to Transylvania where he is to meet an enigmatic Count Dracula, ostensibly about purchasing some land in England. It turns into an Airbnb trip for hell, though, as poor Keanu has to deal with all kinds of antisocial behavior from his host and the host’s trio of lady friends. Also, there are wolves!

The book starts in the same fashion. It’s a collection of journal entries and letters to and from Mr Harker as he journeys from England to spend time at the Count’s house. The Count knows nothing of England and is willing to pay a pretty pence to have a young solicitor visit him and advise him on acquiring property in England. Where should he buy? How can he make sure to get a good deal? What’s the culture like? It all makes sense on the sruface. The old man is friendly enough, even charming, but something is…terribly off. Locals won’t interact with him, except for occasional nomads. Why?

Eventually Mr Harker leaves Transylvania and heads home to England. He is unsure of what, exactly, happened with Count Dracula, but he knows he is glad to be home with Mina, his fiancé. Unfortunately, trouble finds the young couple and their friends, and Hugh Jackman (Professor Van Helsing) has to visit England to figure out why the friend group is acting so weird and why people keep getting beheaded. What a buzzkill!

That’s pretty much the plot, but the main attraction is the atmosphere. There’s a lot of sensational, creepy goings on. A lot of it is spiritual and religious in nature, and in this area I think the Mina of the book is the real hero. If you’ve watched Penny Dreadful, she’s very similar to Eva Green’s character of Vanessa Ives – haunted but resolute in fighting off the darkness in favor of the light. I don’t recall Winona Ryder’s character being so central in the movie, but it’s been a few years.

I wouldn’t recommend this book to casual readers, but you completionist nerds out there should consider giving it a go.

Spoooky

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

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Counter-intuitively, this Gothic horror novel was an absolute joy to read. Mexican Gothic cover

My attention span in 2020 is limited at best, but I could not put down Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic. Her main character, the impetuous and steel-spited Mexico City socialite Noemí Taboada, is truly alive. The rural Mexican setting is a delight, and the creepiness level is appropriate for those of us less versed in horror.

Noemí Taboada is a Mexico City mover and shaker. She lives in the 1940s-50s era, and has expansive ideas for her future. Maybe she’ll be a pianist, an anthropologist, or something else entirely. Who knows? Maybe all of it. She tries on boyfriends like clothes, and this annoys her father to no end. He runs a successful paint company and is hoping his daughter will act as smart as he know she is. In fact, he sends her on a mission to check on Catalina, Noemí’s sick cousin. The two women grew up together, but Catalina has recently gotten married and moved outside of the small town of El Triunfo. Catalina’s new family lives at High Place, an old mansion owned by an English family famous for its silver mining operation. Catalina has sent a letter to Mr Taboada explaining she is sick and needs help. Hence, the mission.

Noemí hops on a train to El Triunfo, despite minor protestations about missing some social events in Mexico City. As soon as she arrives in the town and meets Catalina’s new family at High Place, she knows something isn’t right. Gothicness ensues!

It seems that people either love or hate this book. I think it helps to manage expectations going in. As the name signals – this is a gothic book. There’s a Romantic, building dread. It’s all about atmosphere and mood and weird magnetic pulls to people and places. Don’t expect it to run hot and loud like Fury Road or some other action blockbuster. Just sit by the fire, sip a libation of your choice, and enjoy the glorious weirdness.

My Pen is Dry, The Door is Open, and Something is Waiting

Melmoth: A Novel by Sarah Perry

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This is a modern novel that strikes the perfect feeling of a Gothic novel in the style of Poe or Shelly. It is eerie and creepy with a ton of atmosphere and most of the fear and horror coming from not jump scares, but just that feeling that something is going to happen. Also, the monster is the humans. It’s always the humans… but not always int he way you think. Fair warning, I don’t give any major spoilers ahead, but this is a very atmospheric book, so if you want to go in clean, which might be a good thing, I’ll just tell you this is a great, creepy, thoughtful book so go read it.

This book is for every person who has ever said, “If I were in Nazi Germany there is NO WAY I would have gone along with what they were doing! I’m a good person and that was evil!” Are you sure? Are you really sure, sure? Because there are a lot of people who thought they were good people who facilitated horrible things, most often not by pulling the trigger, but by being too afraid or deluded to step in front of the gun. It is very easy to SAY you would put your life on the line, it is another thing to actually do it. Or to even recognize when it is time to do it. If you chicken out in the moment of truth, how do you live with yourself?

Helen Franklin has sent herself into a self-imposed exile in Prague. She works as a translator and during her time here has lived as spartan a life as possible, purposefully choosing the least comfortable options whenever possible. She rents a room from a nasty, mean old woman, she only eats the bare minimum she needs to survive, her coat is old and threadbare. She has two friends that she made almost in spite of her best efforts, a couple Karel and Thea, that she met in the library. Karel had made another acquaintance at the library, an old man named Hoffman. One afternoon Karel comes to Helen to tell her that Hoffman is dead and now he is afraid because Hoffman passed his research on to him. The manuscript tells the story of Melmoth.

According to legend, Melmoth the Witness has roamed the world since the days of Christ (or maybe longer) looking for the weak and cowardly, standing as witness to their base crimes when there is no one else to see. If she persuades you to join her you are then damned to roam the world with her in an interminable journey watching the worst of humanity as we all stumble and fall on our path.

Of course this is nonsense… of course both Karel and Helen are sure this is nonsense… until… did that shadow just move? Are there more black birds int he square than usual? Anyway, what have they done to have to worry about Melmoth anyway…?

This is a great book with fabulous pacing and not only a creepy tale of darkness and mythological horror, but a really perceptive look into human nature and why we all make the decisions we make, how we trick ourselves when necessary to make it through the day. If I had any quibble it would simply be that when we finally do find out what it is Helen did that she’s beating herself up for, well, I mean, yeah, it was not a great thing, not by a long shot, but her options were pretty limited and given the build up I did have a bit of a feeling of, “wait, that’s it? Damn, girl. Lighten up on yourself.” Though, I’m not sure that wasn’t intentional in some ways.

Anyway, this is a great book if you like moody, mostly atmospheric type suspense/horror. I flew through this kinda long book because I really needed to see what happened and there was a whole lot of, “just one more chapter!” happening because I didn’t want to interrupt the atmosphere the once it got going.

This is my Cannonballer Says Square on my Bingo Card. I heard about this book from andtheItoldYouSos way back in January, but it took me a while to get to it in the backlog.



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