The mushrooms glowed brighter, and she thought perhaps later she might touch them, running her hands against the wall and settling her face against the softness of their flesh. It would be good to rest there, skin pressed tight against their slick bodies, and maybe they'd cover her, the lovely fungi, and cram into her mouth, into her nostrils and eye sockets until she could not breathe and they nestled in her belly and bloomed along her thighs. And Virgil, too, driving deep within her, and the world would be a blur of gold.
Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, is classic gothic. A mist-shrouded cemetery with ghostly presences. Eccentric aristocrats. A rule-enforcing matron. A town healer. Symbolic dreams. Family tragedies and secrets. The house itself is a character ("I've never been in a house with a name.").
Catalina writes that her husband is poisoning her and pleads with Noemi to come save her from the remote house so, at her father's insistence, Noemi sets aside her cocktail parties and frivolous pursuit of anthropological studies to do just that. Catalina's husband is heir to the perhaps-already-squandered Doyle fortune, built on silver mines already long dormant, and its legacy of exploitation. The ailing ruling patriarch is too interested in eugenics. What's not to love?
Some of the characterizations and dialogue felt a little anachronistic, but perhaps I'm just resentful that a woman could be oh so modern so long before me.
I read Mexican Gothic on Halloween weekend, and in fact the anticipation of it overpowered some of its clever beauty. I read it too fast, I read the wrong thing before it, I read it in an agitated state. (I wish I'd known there was a playlist.)
[As I sit in my reading chair and glance at the plant beside me, I am relieved that the mushrooms are gone, I spooned out their shriveled stalks.]
My book purchase included "admission" to a virtual event: a conversation between Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Carmen Maria Machado, whose work and interests intersect in lively ways. I'm inspired to revisit their books with a heightened awareness of their feminist subversion of classic gothic horror tropes (did I just write that sentence?).
Definitely I will keep Mexican Gothic on my shelf to be reread nostalgically some perfectly wretched gloomy day.
"There're heavy places. Places where the air itself is heavy because an evil weighs it down. Sometimes it's a death, could be it's something else, but the bad air, it'll get into your body and it'll nestle there and weigh you down. That's what's wrong with the Doyles of High Place, " the woman said, concluding her tale.
Like feeding an animal madder plants: it dyes the bones red, it stains everything inside crimson, she thought.
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