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Edie—smart, self‑assured, beautiful—always worked hard. She worked as a teller at a bank, she worked to save her first marriage, and later, she worked to raise her daughter as her second marriage came apart. Edie just wanted a good life, but everywhere she turned, her looks defined her. Two brothers fought over her. Her second husband became unreasonably possessive and jealous. And now, as a grandmother, Edie finds herself harassed by a younger man. The Lives of Edie Pritchard tells a multigenerational story of the West through the history of one woman trying to navigate life on her own terms.
Welcome to Read This Book, the newsletter where I recommend one book for your TBR that I think you’re going to love! Genre fiction is my wheelhouse, and about 90% of my personal TBR, so if you’re looking for recommendations in horror, fantasy, or romance, I’ve got you covered!
If I could describe the absolute perfect niche of Gothic horror fiction it would be “the beautiful house rotting from the inside as a metaphor for human emotional, mental, and or moral decay”. It’s not enough for the house to just be old and haunted, I love it when it is literally decaying out from under the main character as they try to root out the cause of the destruction. And this week’s recommendation is a perfect example.
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Mexican Gothic is set in a remote corner of the Mexican countryside, where a crumbling, old mansion sits almost forgotten amid high mountains and jagged ravines. High Place was once a beautiful, English-style Victorian perched above the Doyle family’s prosperous silver mine. But political turmoil in the country spelled the end of the mine a generation ago, and now the house is falling into ruin while the family passes out of existence one violent death at a time.
This is the family into which Noemí’s cousin Catalina marries, falling out of touch with her family until a frantic, barely coherent letter arrives at Noemí’s home, begging for help. Catalina claims that her new husband, Virgil, is trying to poison her. That her life is in danger at High Place. That the house itself, full of death and rot, is trying to do her harm. Convinced that either Catalina’s husband really is hurting her, or that at least her cousin is in need of psychiatric help her new family will not provide, Noemí makes the journey into the mountains to discover the truth. But what she finds behind the aging veneer of High Place is much darker than she could have imagined.
Steeped in rot and romance, from its beautiful but forbidding landscapes to its moldering aristocratic family, Mexican Gothic is a novel with a deep respect for its literary roots. But Moreno-Garcia’s novel also interrogates its own origins, introducing the Doyle’s as not just a wilting example of European dynasticism but also as a brutal colonizing force preying in more ways than one on the land they have usurped and the people they deem beneath them.
Mexican Gothic is dark and visceral with a gruesome biological twist, and for fans of Gothic fiction it’s a must have for any summer horror TBR.
Happy Reading!
Jessica