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Get ready for Halloween as the Vox Book Club reads Mexican Gothic
In Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s new novel, the real gothic is colonialism.
Zac Freeland/Vox
Constance Grady is a senior correspondent on the Culture team for Vox, where since 2016 she has covered books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater.
As October kicks off, we are entering one of the weirdest Halloween seasons I can remember. So to keep the spirit of Halloween going, the Vox Book Club is reading Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, a good old-fashioned piece of gothic spookiness set in an old Mexican mining town.
Mexican Gothic kicks off in the 1950s, as the cosmopolitan, young, Mexico City socialite Noémi travels to a decaying English manor perched above a mining town that the English built and then ruined. It’s full of classic gothic set pieces — women wandering down crumbling hallways in their nightgowns holding up candelabras, repressed and heavily taboo sex, creepy evil mushrooms — and it’s all animated by the knowledge that the real source of evil in this book is colonialism.
It is a Halloween delight, and I can’t wait to talk about it with you. We can even go back to high-school English class and break out “The Yellow Wallpaper” — always a good idea as something to go back to, to be honest — because this book is heavily referential, with a lot about Charlotte Perkins Gilman in it.
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Here’s the full Vox Book Club schedule for October 2020
Friday, October 16: Discussion post on Mexican Gothic
Thursday, October 29: Virtual live event with author Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Reserve your spot!
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