Mexican Gothic

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-5

Chapters 6-10

Chapters 11-17

Chapters 18-20

Chapters 21-27

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

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Chapters 18-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 18 Summary

The next day Noemí cannot settle down. Her dream of the encounter with Virgil is “cold and disturbing” (190) instead of erotic. She feels violated. She restlessly walks through the house and ends up in the library, where she randomly plucks a book on eugenics off the shelves before returning to her room. She smokes a cigarette and begins reading the book. Reality once again shifts around her. She notices on her wall that a section of the mold is shifting with purposeful movement that one would expect from sentient beings only. She is so entranced by the movements that her cigarette burns down to a stub. The sting of the burn snaps her out of this vision of sentient mold. The mold is now completely still, and Noemí wonders if what she saw was a hallucination.

At just that moment, Florence and Virgil enter room, claiming they heard her yell. She says she didn’t yell and demands to see Catalina. Surprisingly, they allow her to visit her cousin, making it clear that they are doing so to humor her. When Noemí enters Catalina’s room, Catalina seems happy and calm, but something about the encounter feels staged to Noemí. After this brief visit, Noemí tells Virgil she is ready to go home and wants to depart immediately. Virgil and Florence tell her that she will have to wait until the next day to leave because it is raining, making the drive down the mountain too treacherous at present.

Virgil cozens her into eating dinner with them one last time. As they talk, Noemí once again gets the sense that there is something almost sexual in the way he looks at her, but the impression is fleeting. Noemí recalls her dream about the sexual encounter with Virgil in the tub and finds that “the memory was tinged with arousal, but also with a terrible humiliation” (196). Virgil is even wearing the jacket he wore in the dream, and this detail distresses Noemí because reality and the dreams are all mixed at this point. Noemí agrees to Virgil’s plan. She feels uncertain and confused. When she examines the cigarette burns on her fingers, they are gone.

Chapter 19 Summary

Noemí wavers on her decision to return home. She ultimately decides to go to a nearby town and contact her father for help and a doctor. Having come to a decision, she finishes packing and heads down to dinner in a party dress. The Doyles have also put out a more formal dinner setting, lending a celebratory air to the occasion. Although Florence allows conversation for this last meal, Noemí is tired and has a headache that prevents her from enjoying it. Francis appears to be just as downhearted.

Virgil makes the unexpected announcement that the evening will culminate in a visit to see Howard. Florence tells Noemí that the roads are sure to be impassible because of rain, and Noemí responds by asking if similar rainfall led to the flooding of the mines years ago. Virgil surprises Noemí again when he announces that despite the long closure of the mines, the Doyles plan to open them again soon with funds Catalina has agreed to invest. Noemí assumes this means the Doyles plan to take advantage of Catalina’s fragile state to secure money for restarting the mines. When Noemí questions the wisdom of reopening the mines, Virgil says it was Noemí’s insistence that it was time for change that convinced him to go ahead with the plan.

Afterward, the dinner party goes to Howard’s room. Noemí is horrified to discover that the man smells and looks like a rotting corpse. His body is covered in barnacle-like boils. Virgil and Florence grab Noemí and force her to kneel close enough to Howard so that he can kiss her on the lips. After this disgusting kiss, Noemí loses consciousness and the ability to control her own body. She finds that she has been projected into the past into a fungus-filled cave where a desperately ill man—clearly a Doyle, based on his resemblance to Howard and Virgil—awaits a cure as a he stands beside a woman and a priest. The man is in a land that is far away from Europe, and it is some time in the 1650s, during the age of European exploration.

The cave is an altar to the god who lives in the fungus. Doyle has ingratiated himself with the keepers of the cave and their priest by marrying the woman, who is a member of their tribe. Ingesting the fungus heals Doyle. Convinced of his superiority and not content simply to be healed, Doyle kills the keepers of the cave and the priest. He gets the woman pregnant and discards her once she gives birth to more of the fungus in the graveyard at High Place. His blood has some property that allows him to survive infestation with the fungus, so he marries his closest blood relatives—his sisters—one after another to propagate the fungus. This pattern of incestuous breeding continues until Ruth’s turn comes.

Noemí looks down at her dream body and discovers that she has been transformed into a fungus that is fruiting; “gold and black” (208) liquid pours from her mouth. Noemí wakes herself the only way she knows how after so many dreams—by opening her eyes. Her physical mouth is full of blood and her teeth.

Chapter 20 Summary

Francis leads Noemí to her room and reveals the Doyles’ dark history. High Place and the land on which it is built is permeated by the fungus. The fungus holds the ancestral memories of all the Doyles who have ever lived with it, and the Doyles call that repository “the gloom” (211). The gloom allows Howard to control people psychologically and explains Noemí’s intense dreams. Francis speculates that the Doyles have been intermarrying and transmigrating Howard’s mind to his descendants for 300 years. After generations of intermarrying and the loss of their fortune during the Mexican Revolution, the Doyles needed an injection of new genetic material and money. Catalina was a first effort, but Noemí seems even more compatible.

Francis is willing to help Noemí escape but is not sure the gloom will let him. As usual, they speak in Spanish to avoid detection. He leaves her, and Noemí has another vision of the ouroboros, which repeats this phrase to her as it circles the room: “Et verbum caro factum est,” meaning “and the Word was made flesh,” the bible verse on the incarnation of Christ through the word of God (216).

Noemí has another vision of a woman giving birth, only this time the participants are in an elaborate chamber. The Doyles eat the child, whom they describe as “[f]lesh of the gods” (217), adding cannibalism to the list of broken taboos. They throw the still living woman into a pit to provide nutrients for the fungus that will permeate High Place and create the gloom, which requires a mind to exist. The old priest in the cave would have sacrificed a part of himself or even his entire self to preserve the fungus, but the Doyles were colonizers and aspired to be gods. They sacrificed others instead.

Noemí’s vision shifts to Howard, who tries to force her to consume a cup of his pus. Noemí just manages to resist by attacking him, and his rotten flesh falls to bits covered in maggots, “[w]orms, stems, and the snake in the grass” (219). A voice tells Noemí that the Doyles have claimed her. Just as a snake wraps around her to devour her, a woman’s voice reminds her to open her eyes. Noemí holds on to this bit of knowledge, sure it will help her resist invasion by the Doyles.

Chapters 18-20 Analysis

This chapter includes the big reveal of the actual threat. Moreno-Garcia reveals the truth using a narrative that combines elements of horror, colonialism, and myth.

While the loss of bodily integrity through rape or other violence is only hinted at in earlier chapters, in these chapters, Moreno-Garcia leans in to the horror elements by showing corpses, bodily disintegration, human sacrifice, and the undead. The detailed, specific descriptions of the fluids and maggots coming out of Howard’s body are intended to repulse the average reader. Noemí’s struggle to consistently see these corrupt bodies as horrifying shows the degree to which the house and the fungus have overcome her autonomy. Her small acts of resistance, such as opening her eyes and refusing to drink Howard’s bodily fluids, injects further suspense in this section by giving the reader some hope that she will be able to escape the Doyles.

Moreno-Garcia extends the novel beyond straight horror by providing additional detail about the history of the Doyle family. The cultural context for Mexican Gothic is the colonial history of Mexico, but it is also about the exploitation of important elements of pre-Columbian Mexican culture. Most readers will have some awareness of the significance of human sacrifice and death rites in cultures like that of the Aztecs and of healing and mystical traditions in which consumption of fungi (mushrooms) are key parts of rites that bring the healer closer to death and the gods.

In many of these traditions, human sacrifice is a necessary part of the cycle of life, death, and rebirth for the sake of assuring fertility, success in agriculture, or averting disaster if the gods haven’t received their due. These acts of sacrifice are generally made on behalf of the community or another societal group. The priest in the cave in Noemí’s vision engages in partial self-sacrifice to secure the cycle of rebirth for his people, for example.

At root, the Doyles are colonizers and imperialists. The Doyle of 1650 traveled to a far-off, non-European country where he secured the fungus and the woman from the cave as a vessel to transport the fungus. The Doyles came to Mexico for silver, but they also came for the protection and impunity that being privileged Europeans provided them even after Mexican independence. Howard exploits this privilege and the priest’s generosity for his own gain. Noemí’s vision reveals that Howard’s aim is to avoid the cycle of life, death, and rebirth by making himself immortal and sacrificing the future—Doyle children—to maintain his own life. The Doyles’ rite to attain immortality combines elements of Mexican culture with Christian ritual to allow the Doyles to consume countless lives and bodies to enrich themselves.

The truth about Doyle house—that it is built on violence, violation of taboos against incest and cannibalism, and an unholy alliance between the human and inhuman—is certainly designed to make the reader to feel visceral horror. The Doyles’ predations, which include sacrificing large numbers of Mexican workers for financial gain, using women’s wombs as production facilities, and insisting that other people bear the costs of the Doyles’ actions, are all typical outcomes and mechanisms of colonialism in particular. Moreno-Garcia uses these details to recast these actions as horror on a grand historical scale.