A review by hillmeister
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

3.0

Moreno-Garcia uses what is often thought of as a British literary genre (gothic fiction) to weave a horror story where the ultimate villain and contagion is British colonialism. She employs and subverts the gothic genre tropes in a wholly refreshing way. While this book is conceptually brilliant..it is a little shaky on execution. The first half of the book really did seem to drag-on, almost painfully so - lots of repetitive conversations, surface level character development, etc. There were no sitting-on-the-edge-of-my-seat moments - just not very suspenseful for a gothic horror of any type, which was a disappointment. Like I said, the use of the gothic genre (or post-colonial gothic genre) in this book to discuss topics like race, gender and nationality was really well thought out - but it didn’t go far enough to get me emotionally invested.