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Book Review: Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

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Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Del Rey, 2020

ISBN: 9780525620785

Available: Hardcover, Paperback, Audiobook, Kindle

 

In 1950’s Mexico, Noemi, a flirtatious, intelligent fashionista, decides her cousin Catalina has been out of touch for too long.  When Noemi receives a disturbing letter from Catalina suggesting that she might want to escape from her new marriage, Noemi packs her gorgeous wardrobe and heads to isolated High Place, the ancestral home of the English Doyles, to investigate.

Ever the realist, skeptical of her cousin’s fairytale princess notions about marriage, Noemi immediately distrusts her suave brother-in-law. She soon realizes that he is evil, and so is his menacing house that has wallpaper “slippery, like a strained muscle” and walls like “sickly organs” with “veins and arteries clogged with secret excesses.” Something is not right at High Place, and Noemi starts to feel its curse invading her mind and body, slowly but surely, just as it has infected her cousin.

What begins as a poetic, gothic fairytale, becomes a wild blend of fantasy, horror, and science-fiction in Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. The Doyle men and women have preserved their family line by choosing between “fit and unfit people.” The men wield their power by practicing eugenics through a weird and totally terrifying combination of sexual abuse, drugs, intimidation, and psychological control. The house has an actual heartbeat that is pulsing with mold, fungus and rot, and the creepy family patriarch, an ugly man full of secrets and disgusting tumors, sores, and black bile, is directing and insuring the family’s future from his deathbed. Murders have occurred at High Place, and strange epidemics have killed droves of workers in the family’s silver mine. Once Noemi has the facts, she knows she must fight and use her wits  to survive and save the people she cares about before the evil overcomes them and traps them in a living hell forever.

Although the book seems set in a period later than the 50’s in terms Noemi’s language and sensibility, it still is, in more than one sense, a horror story that reflects the historically violent subjugation of women used as breeders in families and cultures obsessed with lineage and legacy. Religion, status, and seclusion frequently became barriers to freedom for these women by preventing them from making choices about the direction of their own lives. The women of Mexican Gothic cope with horrible suffering and mirror the superhuman strength it took for real women to endure, and sometimes find rare opportunities to escape, the nightmarish situations forced on their gender. Highly Recommended.

Contains: gore, sexual situations, profanity, incest, body horror

 

Reviewed by Nova Hadley

Editor’s note: Mexican Gothic is a nominee on the final ballot for the 2020 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel. 

 

Posted on March 1, 2021 by , Reply

Women in Horror Month: Book Review: Velocities: Stories by Kathe Koja

cover art for Velocities: Stories by Kathe Koja

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Velocities: Stories by Kathe Koja

Meerkat Press, 2020

ISBN-13: 139781946154231

Available : Paperback and Kindle

 

Kathe Koja’s work defies any label. Certainly it is in the area of dark fiction, often imbued with gloomy atmospheres, occasionally turning into horror, sometimes disguised as historical vignettes. The eclectic nature of her  literary output is well represented in this collection, which provides an effective showcase of some her short fiction, previously scattered in different anthologies, as well as two new ones.

Thus, if you’re not familiar with this gifted author, the present volume is a great opportunity to get acquainted with her work. While most of the stories collected here have been previously published, there are two original to this collection.

The book is formally divided into five  different sections: At Home, Downtown, On the Way, Over There, and Inside, but, truth be told, these labels mean very little in terms of the stories’ content.

This volume features thirteen stories, some more memorable than others, but mostly interesting and quite enjoyable. To me the more accomplished tales are:  “Baby”, a dark story revolving around a peculiar puppet; “The Marble Lily”, featuring a morgue janitor morbidily fascinated with death; “Pas de Deux”, portraying a woman who decides to leave the boring comfort of her married life to totally devote herself to dancing; “Far and Wee”, where country life and city life are painfully compared;  the disquieting “ La Reine d’Enfer”; and the gloomy “Coyote Pass”.

Very few writers share Koja’s ability to describe the grim side of life and the pain and secret melancholy of human condition. You’ve been warned.

 

Contains: occasional sex and mild violence

 

Reviewed by Mario Guslandi

 

Editor’s note: Velocities: Stories is a nominee on the final ballot for the 2020 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection.

 

 

 

Posted on February 27, 2021 by , Reply

Book Review: The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton

cover art for The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton

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The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton

Sourcebooks, 2020

ISBN-13 : 978-1728206028

Available: Hardcover, paperback

 

Stuart Turton probably wouldn’t describe his books as horror, but they are compelling, original, and dread-inducing. In a departure from the surreal Agatha Christie-like The 7 1/2 Lives of Evelyn Hardcastle, in The Devil and the Dark Sea, this story takes place in 1634, on a ship leaving from Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia), the center of the Dutch East Indian Trading Company, for Amsterdam, home of the company’s headquarters, a journey of about eight months during which many ships were lost as sea. Readers expecting accurate historical fiction will not find it here: in a note, Turton essentially says he did the research, but threw it out the window if he found it wouldn’t work with his story. By changing as much as he did, he’s basically written an alternate history, which would be fine except that he never identifies it as such, which is unfair to readers unfamiliar with the setting, who will think it’s solidly grounded in the historical period (I guess once someone calls your work genre-bending it’s hard to commit).

 

Passengers on the Saardam include Jan Haan, the ambitious governor general of Batavia; his wife, Sara Wessell; and their inventive daughter, Lia; his mistress, Creesjie Jens, and her sons; his chamberlain, Cornelius Vos; and guard captain Jacobi Drecht.  Also traveling on the ship is Sammy Pipps, a Sherlock-type detective and alchemist of unknown origin who has been accused of spying, and his bodyguard/case recorder, former Lieutenant Arent Hayes. Before the ship leaves, a leper warns the passengers not to leave, warning that the devil “Old Tom” will be their downfall, but the governor general is insistent on leaving for Amsterdam immediately. Complicating things by bringing religion into the mix on a ship where passengers and crew are already uneasy and superstitious, a predikant, or preacher, and his acolyte Isabel, stow away on the ship as well.

 

Just as the ship sets off, the sail is unfurled to show a symbol that Creesje, the predikant, Arent, and one of the sailors individually recognize and associate with Old Tom. Is the devil really on the ship with the passengers and sailors, are they imagining things, or is someone playing with the characters’ fears in hopes of personal gain? The predikant, a former witch hunter, claims they’ll know for sure once three unholy miracles have occurred. As the ship gets further out onto the open ocean, the unholy miracles are identified, and the weather worsens, the onboard situation gets more violent and treacherous, and it becomes clear that, real or not, Old Tom has followers among the crew. As the histories of the characters and plot twists are unraveled, and the deaths stack up, the situation becomes even more unnerving. Is the ship haunted by Old Tom, or is something else going on?

 

Turton does a fantastic job of creating a sense of mystery and dread. There is no escape from the ship out on the ocean, just people, most of whom don’t like or trust each other, adrift after a storm. Turton admits he took liberties with history for the purpose of the story, so I don’t know if sailors truly lived continually in such brutal, violent environments, but he paints a vivid picture of the dynamics. Characters who could have been one-dimensional were fully developed: Arent turns out to be the governor general’s nephew, and while Haan might have been terrible to his wife and underlings,  he clearly cherishes his relationship with Arent. Haan’s wife Sara could have been set up in opposition to his mistress, but they turn out to be close friends. Sammy and Arent, for all their similarities to Holmes and Watson, are completely different in body type, personality, background, and overarching motivation. I found the very ending unneccessarily brutal, unrealistic and extremely disappointing, and felt it marred the story in a big way,  but I felt the atmosphere, character development, and descriptive language still made this worth reading.

 

The Devil in the Dark Water reveals some very dark aspects of overseas trade and the participants in it during the 1600s. No one comes away untainted. Despite the faulty ending, it’s a tale I won’t soon forget, and I would certainly give Turton another chance.

Contains: violence, gore, murder, implied rape, brutal killing of animals, body horror, mass murder

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

 

 

Posted on February 24, 2021 by , Reply
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