“I suppose now you realize we are not like other people and this house is not like other houses." [loc. 2971]
The setting is Mexico in the 1950s, opening in Mexico City but focussed on an isolated mansion near a decaying mining town. Noemí Taboada is a glamorous young socialite who enjoys parties, boyfriends, driving a convertible and studying anthropology. She's not best pleased to be summoned home from a party by her father, who is concerned about the wellbeing of her cousin Catalina. Catalina was always the imaginative one, beguiled by Gothic literature and fairytales: her recent letters imply that her English husband, Virgil Doyle, is planning to poison her. Noemí is packed off to High Place, the gloomy, sprawling home of Doyle and his family, to determine whether there's any truth in Catalina's fears.
Noemí is an interesting protagonist: somewhat impulsive, prone to rule-breaking, independent in thought and manner, but with a weary understanding of women's roles in patriarchal Mexican (and English) society. She realises the need to ingratiate herself with the Doyles: "women needed to be liked or they’d be in trouble. A woman who is not liked is a bitch, and a bitch can hardly do anything: all avenues are closed to her". [loc. 807] Catalina, by contrast, is two-dimensional. Her illness, and the brevity of Noemí's visits with her, don't give much opportunity for character to be revealed.
There's a distinct sense of menace to High Place, and a very real -- though far from predictable -- threat to Noemí and Catalina: but I found Moreno-Garcia's prose heavy and distancing. This is an atmospheric novel, with a well-paced ramping-up of mystery and dread: the comparisons to du Maurier are well-deserved, and I was also reminded of Shirley Jackson and her gift for revealing the terror of the ordinary. Yet Mexican Gothic didn't engage me as much as I'd hoped.
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