Horror in the silver mines

 

Despite my difficulties focusing on reading fiction lately, I borrowed an ARC of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic from a friend, because I am a stubborn bitch and I was absolutely DETERMINED to relax at least one weekend this ridiculous summer, and that means reading YA novels by the lake in Maine, goddammit. I didn’t get to it on my last Maine trip because I just napped through that one, but I decided to put it at the top of the list for this weekend, when I went up for three days, none of which were holidays, and had a bit more reading time even if I did end up taking some naps. 

Mexican Gothic was definitely a good choice for me for trying to get back into a fiction groove because it is squarely within one of my very favorite genres of all time: one in which a lovely young girl meets a tall, dark, and brooding house. (Usually there’s a dude somewhere around too, but he’s usually kind of boring.) In this case the house is named High Place and it is a full-blown crumbling eighteenth-century English mansion, inexplicably stuck in the mountains well outside Mexico City. Well, not that inexplicably; there is definitely an explanation for why an English mansion has been painstakingly constructed in the middle of Mexico, and it unsurprisingly involves some super racist rich English people. 

Our heroine, Noemi, is a 22-year-old socialite and anthropology student in fashionable 1950s Mexico City, where her pastimes involve going to parties, smoking cigarettes, changing her major, and squabbling with her dad, a paint company executive. It’s all fun and games and regular-level familial dysfunction until her dad gets an extremely creepy letter from her cousin Catalina, who married a rich English guy in a scandalously rushed fashion last year and who no one has seen since he whisked her off to his ancestral mining estate in the countryside. Dad sends Noemi to investigate, to see if Catalina needs to come to the city for psychiatric treatment or something, which seems to everybody to be the most likely situation. 

High Place is a masterpiece of Manderleyesque creepery, a place where everything is falling apart as the handful of obsessive weirdos inhabiting it refuse to let anything change. There is a mean and judgemental female housekeeper, a lecherous old eugenicist patriarch who everyone is terrified to cross, Catalina’s handsome but vicious husband, some brainwashed servants, and the housekeeper’s son Francis, the only person around with half a personality and therefore the obligatory male romantic lead. Also Catalina, who may or may not be mad/poisoned/suffering from tuberculosis/whatever, but at any rate isn’t allowed to be in Noemi’s company nearly as much as she’d like, and therefore winds up being a fairly minor character. There are a few normal people down in the town--like a real doctor, and the village wise woman, who apparently get along quite well, have a healthy respect for each other’ s practices, and are united in their dislike of the weird-ass English doctor who has been treating Catalina for “tuberculosis”--and… actually, that’s mostly it, there’s just doctors everywhere and nobody else. 

Anyway, High Place is very, very clearly and obviously haunted, regardless of whether you believe in hauntings or not, and so Noemi has to figure out what kind of haunting it is and how it works before she can do the thing you always have to do in haunted house stories, which is put the haunting to rest. I have to say that as much as I am pleasantly familiar with all the genre stuff that Moreno-Garcia is drawing on for this book (I have read a lot of girl-meets-house books), I absolutely did not see this particular backstory of madness and murder coming. It’s quite fascinating and extremely well set up; there’s all sorts of clues in the earlier parts of the book that I just zipped past at the time but were clearly foreshadowing in hindsight. Like all good horror novels, the story is rooted deep in questions of social order and family, and just how fucked up people can get about them. Like, the obligatory romantic plotline is reasonably boring as a romantic plotline but you get invested in it anyway because in order for it to work between Noemi and Francis, Francis has to extricate himself from the house and the family, and I use the word “extricate” here very deliberately--it’s not as simple as leaving. 

The book also reminded me that I know fuck-all about Mexican history; I should probably do something about that. 

Anyway, this was a really fun and suspenseful addition to one of my favorite genres of fiction, and I recommend it highly if you, too, like books where stubborn young women fight evil houses (and win). 

A far-flung bit of local history

Several years ago--it’s somewhat embarrassing how many--when I didn’t know so many people in Boston and had more spare time to do stuff just because it seemed cool, I wandered into Porter Square Books for a book event for a book and author I had never heard of. But it seemed like the sort of thing I should stick around for, as the book was titled At the Point of a Cutlass: The Pirate Capture, Bold Escape, and Lonely Exile of Philip Ashton, by one Gregory Flemming. Mr. Flemming gave a lively talk in which he seemed like he’d had a ton of fun researching the book, which follows and contextualizes the unwilling exploits of one Philip Ashton, an early 18th-century fisherman from Marblehead, Massachusetts, which borders Salem. The extremely short version is that Mr. Ashton’s fishing crew went up Nova Scotia way for the cod, got kidnapped by one bloodthirsty bastard name of Edward Low, was beaten up a lot and forced to do menial labor all the way to the Caribbean by way of the Azores, then ran away at a water stop and lived for nearly two years on an uninhabited island near Port Royal, Jamaica, until he was rescued by a ship from another little North Shore town right outside Marblehead. He then got home and, with the help of his local minister, wrote a memoir that became a bestseller, then went back to being a regular fisherman.

 

That is, of course, the extremely short version, although even the long version is a little skimpy on stuff that happened during the sixteen months or so he was living alone on the island, presumably because it was boring as shit and approximately five things happened over the entire year and a half. Much of the book is therefore padded out with the stories of the people around Ashton, like some of his shipmates, the stories of the various characters he runs into, his priest and every other priest his priest ever hung out with, and, of course, the career of the pirate captain who kidnapped him, Edward Low. In fact, Edward Low’s brief but bloody career probably gets the most page time of any one story arc in the book. This is a very good narrative choice, IMO, because Edward Low is one of the most absolutely fucked-up, brutal pirate characters of the Golden Age, and he doesn’t get nearly enough publicity. He was known for being extremely creative, torture-wise, and he and his fleet caused an enormous amount of havoc in a very short period of time up and down the Atlantic seaboard. He was great fun to read about.

 

At the rate of only one pirate book a summer it is unlikely I will get all my pirate books read anytime soon, but I really do tend to hang onto them so I can read them at the lake, and I will probably continue to do that because it is certainly the nicest situation for reading about pirate shit specifically.