Recommendations
Books Like Mexican Gothic
Best books to read after Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Mexican Gothic transplants the English Gothic tradition to 1950s Mexico, grounding its horror in the real history of colonial exploitation. These 8 books share its female-centered Gothic dread, its use of the crumbling house as a site of generational violence, and its feminist analysis of the systems that trap women.
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We Have Always Lived in the Castle
by Shirley Jackson
Jackson's 1962 Gothic novel about two sisters isolated in a manor after the murder of most of their family is the American classic that Mexican Gothic most directly engages with — the same isolated house, the same female protagonist who has made a complete world of her confinement, the same ambiguity about who is monstrous and who is victim.
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The Haunting of Hill House
by Shirley Jackson
Jackson's 1959 horror novel — the foundational American haunted house story — establishes the Gothic convention of the house with a malevolent will that Mexican Gothic employs in its most distinctive horror: High Place is conscious, and Jackson invented the vocabulary for that consciousness.
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Rebecca
by Daphne du Maurier
Du Maurier's 1938 novel — in which a young woman marries into a great house overshadowed by her predecessor — is the direct Gothic template that Mexican Gothic transforms: Noemí Taboada is the nameless narrator made active and competent, Florence Doyle is Mrs. Danvers made literal horror, and High Place is Manderley made biological.
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Her Body and Other Parties
by Carmen Maria Machado
Machado's feminist horror story collection uses the same method as Mexican Gothic — transforming genre conventions from within to make them carry feminist analysis — and is the closest companion in contemporary American feminist horror fiction.
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Gods of Jade and Shadow
by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Moreno-Garcia's 2019 novel — a road trip across 1920s Mexico with the Mayan god of death — is set in the same Mexican cultural landscape as Mexican Gothic and is the best entry into her other fiction for readers who want more of her voice and her engagement with Mexican history and mythology.
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The Little Stranger
by Sarah Waters
Waters's 2009 Gothic novel — set in a decaying English manor house in the years immediately after World War II, narrated by a country doctor who may or may not be the source of the house's hauntings — is the closest contemporary British parallel to Mexican Gothic: the same crumbling estate, the same ambiguity about whether the horror is supernatural or psychological, the same class analysis of who owns the house and who is trapped by it.
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The Turn of the Screw
by Henry James
James's 1898 novella — a governess at an isolated English estate becomes convinced that the children in her care are being corrupted by the ghosts of two former servants — is the foundational Gothic ambiguity text and a direct ancestor of Mexican Gothic's treatment of the question of whether the horror is real or imagined; both works refuse to resolve it.
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Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1987 novel — in which a formerly enslaved woman is haunted by the ghost of her murdered daughter — uses the Gothic mode as Moreno-Garcia does: to make the horrors of a specific historical system of exploitation (slavery, colonialism) legible through the conventions of supernatural fiction.
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