Mexican Gothic
a mesmerising historical Gothic fantasy set in 1950s Mexico
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4.3 • 4 Ratings
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- €0.99
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- €0.99
Publisher Description
'You don't read this book so much as surrender to it. A dark and heady swoon' THE GUARDIAN
'As rich is suspense as it is in lush '50s atmosphere' ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
He is trying to poison me. You must come for me, Noemí. You have to save me.
After receiving a frantic letter from her newlywed cousin begging for someone to save her from a mysterious doom, socialite Noemí Taboada heads to High Place, a distant house in the Mexican countryside. She's not sure what she will find - her cousin's husband, a handsome Englishman, is a stranger, and Noemí knows little about the region.
Noemí is more suited for cocktail parties than amateur sleuthing. But she's also tough and smart, with an indomitable will, and she is not afraid: not of her cousin's new alluring, menacing husband; not of his father; and not even of the house itself, which begins to invade Noemi's dreams with dark visions.
For there are many secrets behind the walls of High Place. The family's once colossal wealth and faded mining empire keeps them safe from prying eyes, but as Noemí digs deeper, she unearths stories of violence and madness.
And Noemí, mesmerized by the terrifying yet seductive world of High Place, may find it impossible to escape.
'Darkly brilliant and captivating' YANGSZE CHOO, bestselling author of The Fox Wife
'Moreno-Garcia gets it absolutely right' THE TELEGRAPH
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Moreno-Garcia's energetic romp through the gothic genre (after Gods of Jade and Shadow) is delightfully bonkers. In the 1950s, Noem , a flirtatious socialite and college student, travels from Mexico City to rescue her cousin Catalina from the nightmarish High Place, a remote Mexican mountain villa. Catalina has recently married the chilly, imperiously seductive Virgil Doyle, heir to a now defunct British silver mining operation. Beset by mysterious fevers, Catalina has written to her uncle, Noem 's father, telling him, "This house is sick with rot, stinks of decay, brims with every single evil and cruel sentiment." Noem clashes with Virgil's father, Howard who subscribes to theories of eugenics along with a set of oddly robotic British servants. Beset by horrifying dreams and visions, and unsettled by a peculiar fungus that grows everywhere, Noem soon fears for her own life as well as Catalina's. In a novel that owes a considerable debt to the nightmarish horror and ornate language of H.P. Lovecraft, the situations in which Noem attempts to prevail get wilder and stranger with every chapter, as High Place starts exhibiting a mind of its own, and Noemi learns that Howard is far older than he appears to be. Readers who find the usual country house mystery too tame and languid won't have that problem here.
