Mexican Gothic

Silvia Moreno-Garcia has named the gothic romance tradition as the thing her novel is arguing with, and Jane Eyre is its central text. From Bronte: a young woman arriving alone at a remote house that belongs to an old English family; a household that will not explain its own rules; an invalid patriarch; a courtship conducted as a power arrangement; and something kept upstairs that everybody knows about and nobody names. The argument is the setting. High Place is an English family's house in the Mexican mountains, built on a silver mine worked by local labour, and what is wrong with it is eugenic and colonial rather than merely haunted. Filed MEDIUM: the map already records the Lovecraft half of the same book.

Moreno-Garcia has been explicit that Mexican Gothic is written against Lovecraft as much as out of him, and Innsmouth is the story it sits closest to:

• An isolated town held by one family with a secret in the bloodline
• Inheritance as contamination, and a visitor who discovers they are part of the plan
• Something non-human sustaining the family's prosperity, in exchange

The inversion is the point. Lovecraft's horror at Innsmouth is racial degeneration, and Moreno-Garcia hands that anxiety to the English colonists, with eugenics stated openly as the Doyles' creed, then makes a Mexican woman the one who survives it. Filed MEDIUM: a reaction_against reading is defensible here.