RaveStrange Horizons... handles this transition from Gothic to Weird horror in an especially adept way ... If there is a problem with Mexican Gothic—and, having had time to mull the book over in my head after reading, I\'m not entirely convinced there even is one—it is a problem with genre. Moreno-Garcia lets each element of her novel breathe by tacking through mystery and surrealism, dreams and intriguing goings-on, and the investigation of the intriguing goings-on of dreams. As disparate as all these modes can be, they all fit under the horror-thriller umbrella. Each works on the anticipation of ignorance and the release of knowledge, on a fundamental drive toward explanation or revelation. Mysteries and ghost stories beg to be solved; the Weird and surreal insist that solutions are immanent or impossible. To the reader or to the cosmos, knowledge is a release ... Even with that gossamer thread to connect the parts into a whole, however, Mexican Gothic faces a difficult task to sew together these subgenres. It is not nearly as simple a task as Moreno-Garcia makes it seem. Her writing in Mexican Gothic is compulsively readable without sacrificing the sentence, which is an accomplishment in itself. Instead of stopping there, though, Moreno-Garcia turns this literary feat into a sort of genre glue, bringing together disparate subgenres in a way that makes them seem altogether suited for one another ... Unlike the masterful maneuvering between Gothic, Weird, mystery, and surrealism, the alternate history and paranormal romance elements never quite seem to gel into a whole. At their worst they feel like filler, sometimes even patronizing to the audience. At their best, they produce powerful images that remain disconnected from the broader picture—and that best is, like the rest of Mexican Gothic, very, very good. Phenomenal, even.
