Mexican Gothic works for a reason that has little to do with ghosts. Silvia Moreno-Garcia sends Noemí Taboada, a debutante in 1950s Mexico, to High Place, a distant house in the mountains where her newly married cousin is writing frantic letters, and then does three things most gothic novels manage only one of. She makes the house a body, something that breathes and feeds and gets into Noemí's dreams, and she makes the rot old and colonial: an English family, a silver fortune dug out of Mexican ground and long since spent, a patriarch with opinions about bloodlines. And she gives us a heroine who argues back, who smokes and asks the rude question at dinner, instead of a girl waiting to be explained to.
The list is arranged by which of the three you missed most when you closed the book: the house, the family, or the woman in the bed. Noemí herself is harder to find, which is one reason the pick is the pick. If you only read one book from this list, make it What Moves the Dead, which takes all three and finishes in an evening.
If it was the house
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
Four people come to stay at Hill House for a summer: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar who wants proof of a haunting; Theodora, a worldly guest invited for her knack with the uncanny; Luke, who will inherit the place; and Eleanor, a friendless young woman who has never had a room of her own. The house is waiting, and before the summer is out it will choose one of them. That is the idea Mexican Gothic runs with, a building with an appetite and a preference. The difference is the woman it picks. Eleanor does not argue back, and watching her give way tells you how much Noemí's stubbornness is worth. See the book.
What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher
Alex Easton, a retired soldier, gets word that their childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying and rides to the Usher family's ancestral house in the remote countryside of Ruritania. What they find is a house ringed with fungus, a dark lake that seems to pulse, hares that move wrong, Madeline sleepwalking and speaking in strange voices, and her brother Roderick wasting away. It is Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" retold, and the book here that most resembles Mexican Gothic in its bones: a remote house, a woman sickening inside it, an outsider who refuses the official explanation, and something in the ground that should not be there. Easton has a British mycologist and a baffled American doctor for allies, and a soldier's refusal to be condescended to that is as close to Noemí as anyone here gets. It does what High Place does in 176 pages, and the ending makes good on every hint. See the book.
These Walls Remember by del Sandeen
Mickie and Delilah are estranged sisters who inherit a distant relative's house in Savannah, Georgia, and plan to sell it, split the money and never speak again. A note tells them not to go into the attic. They go into the attic. What follows is visions, memory lapses, accidents, and echoes of earlier residents, some of whom were never seen again. Then Delilah, who wanted out most, starts to want to stay. If the thing that got you at High Place was a house with a digestive system, Sandeen writes one, in a Southern gothic where the building's history and the family's are the same wound. It came out this August, the newest book here. See the book.
Reader note: the house's past includes racial prejudice, and some scenes are hard going.
If it was the family
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
Merricat Blackwood is eighteen, lives with her sister Constance and their uncle on the family estate, and walks into the village for groceries past people who hate her. Most of the rest of the family died at the dinner table some years ago, and the village has its own opinion about who put the arsenic in the sugar. Then cousin Charles arrives with an eye on the house, and the arrangement starts to crack. This is the family-as-rot novel, told from inside by one of the strangest narrators in American fiction, and funny in a way that makes the ending worse. It is the shorter and odder of Jackson's two house books, 160 pages in the Penguin Classics Deluxe edition, with an afterword by Jonathan Lethem. See the book.
The Witching Hour by Anne Rice
Rowan Mayfair is a neurosurgeon in California who was given up at birth and knows nothing about the house on First Street in New Orleans or the thirteen generations of witches who have lived in it. She can kill with a thought, and has done it without meaning to. Then a man drowns off the coast, she brings him back, and an order called the Talamasca, which has quietly documented the Mayfairs for three centuries, decides it is time she read the file. The file is most of the book: a family history that runs from a seventeenth-century Scottish burning through colonial Saint-Domingue to Louisiana, each generation attended by the same presence, which they call Lasher. If what held you at High Place was the sense of a bloodline cultivated like a crop, with colonial money under it, this is that idea at doorstop length. It is the first of the Mayfair books, and where it fits with the vampire novels is in our reading order. Save it for a long dark stretch of winter. See the book.
Reader note: explicit sexual content, including scenes many readers find disturbing.
A House with Good Bones by T. Kingfisher
"Mom seems off," Sam Montgomery's brother tells her, and when she arrives at the house on a quiet North Carolina street she sees what he means. The warm clutter is gone and the walls are painted white. Her mother jumps at small noises and looks over her shoulder in an empty room. There are new rose bushes in the garden, vultures circling the garden, and, under the roses, a jar of teeth. Sam studies ancient insects for a living and narrates like a scientist, dry and curious, and the dread arrives without the voice changing. This is the family question from Mexican Gothic asked of an ordinary American household: what did the people before you do to this ground, and what does it want from you now? Barnes & Noble named it one of the best horror books of 2023, and at 272 pages it is a two-evening read. See the book.
If it was the woman in the bed
Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin
Rosemary Woodhouse and her husband Guy, a struggling actor, move into the Bramford, a Manhattan apartment building prized for its Victorian details and gargoyled facade, with a darker history. The neighbors, the Castevets, are elderly and very attentive. Guy lands a major role. Rosemary becomes pregnant, the pregnancy takes frightening turns, and everyone around her has an explanation ready. Levin moved the gothic from the country house to a city apartment, and the book is about what Mexican Gothic is about at its core: a young woman whose own body is being managed by other people, and the slow work of trusting what she sees over what she is told. It reads in a sitting, and the film with Mia Farrow follows it almost line for line. See the book.
Reader note: the plot turns on a non-consensual encounter.
Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
Laura lives with her father in a remote house in a central European forest and is lonely enough to be glad when a carriage accident on the road outside delivers a guest: a girl her own age named Carmilla, affectionate by day and secretive about everything else. Carmilla sleeps most of the day. Laura starts to dream, then to sicken, and the household's explanations do not hold. This is the oldest book here and the root of much that came after: it was serialized in 1871 and 1872, more than a quarter century before Dracula, and the young woman wasting in a great house while a charming visitor leans over her bed is a shape Noemí's cousin would recognize. The edition we carry is edited by Carmen Maria Machado, whose introduction reframes the whole thing, at 160 pages with illustrations. See the book.
Want more? All eight sit on our Horror shelf, and The Witching Hour keeps company with more Anne Rice on the Dark & Gothic Fantasy shelf. For more of the building itself, our 13 haunted house books guide has Mexican Gothic in it and twelve others. See our shipping policy for current options and charges.
