Silvia Moreno-Garcia

“Now she recalled one particular thing Jung wrote: everyone carries a shadow. And like a shadow the woman’s words hung over Noemi as she drove back to High Place” (70).

Just like a David Lynch production is not my usual film, this book is not my usual read. And just like watching Blue Velvet for the first time, I loved Mexican Gothic so much. This atmospheric thriller was as smooth as green velvet because of its dark whimsy—full of fables and fairytales—yet it was layered with such weight, the seriousness of gender, eugenics, race, and colonization. And the characters are just as layered as the thick atmosphere. While Noemi appears, at first, to be just a flighty socialite and Catalina appears, at first, to be just a hysterical woman, it doesn’t take long to see that these woman are not to be discredited; rather, they are forces to be reckoned with, and it’s through their will, insight, and intellect that ultimately frees themselves.

The first half of the novel could be called slow, but I think the pace is perfection—a perfect painting revealed: one of personified castles shrouded in bilious-green fog and smothering velvet green rooms. Mildew rotting the inside and moss suffocating the outside and everywhere—inside and outside, awake and asleep—is the melancholy, most notably in frail Francis. This moorish Gothic setting is heightened through the isolation and Lovecraftian characters who live at High Place: Virgil and Arthur and Florence and the weird family doctor. But it’s in the second half of the novel that these characters move from annoying to nefarious. It’s also in this second half where the pace picks up quite a bit and the pieces come together in quite a weird way—a Lynch-Lovecraft way.

What I love most about this book is that this is more than a monster’s tale; it’s about biology and religion and mythology and philosophy all amalgamated together. There’s so much here, such richness, and the ending still manages to feel hopeful despite the absurd arsenic trauma endured (by the characters and the readers): “The future, she thought, could not be predicted, and the shape of things could not be divined…. But they were young that morning, and they could cling to hope. Hope that the world could be remade, kinder and sweeter” (301).… (más)

The story of the daughter of H. G. Wells's Dr. Moreau, who creates human-animal combinations on a secret island. Here the island is the Yucatan, so the animals can be from there and so can the politics. Although the beginning slumped after the introduction of Moreau's project, leaning toward a coming-of-age female love story, most of the novel was redeemed by the cinematic detail of the battles in the last third of the book. Considering it was written in contemporary times (even if set in the 1870s) I had hoped for more science and scientific explanations about the "hybrids", and there were some strange scenes where important things happened (like the death of a hybrid) but meant nothing to the story. A good book, just not as evocative of the moral horror that was so evident in Wells's original story.… (más)

The story of the daughter of H. G. Wells's Dr. Moreau, who creates human-animal combinations on a secret island. Here the island is the Yucatan, so the animals can be from there and so can the politics. Although the beginning slumped after the introduction of Moreau's project, leaning toward a coming-of-age female love story, most of the novel was redeemed by the cinematic detail of the battles in the last third of the book. Considering it was written in contemporary times (even if set in the 1870s) I had hoped for more science and scientific explanations about the "hybrids", and there were some strange scenes where important things happened (like the death of a hybrid) but meant nothing to the story. A good book, just not as evocative of the moral horror that was so evident in Wells's original story.… (más)