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As October kicks off, we are entering one of the weirdest Halloween seasons I can remember. So to keep the spirit of Halloween going, the Vox Book Club is reading Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, a good old-fashioned piece of gothic spookiness set in an old Mexican mining town.
Mexican Gothic kicks off in the 1950s, as the cosmopolitan, young, Mexico City socialite Noémi travels to a decaying English manor perched above a mining town that the English built and then ruined. It’s full of classic gothic set pieces — women wandering down crumbling hallways in their nightgowns holding up candelabras, repressed and heavily taboo sex, creepy evil mushrooms — and it’s all animated by the knowledge that the real source of evil in this book is colonialism.
It is a Halloween delight, and I can’t wait to talk about it with you. We can even go back to high-school English class and break out “The Yellow Wallpaper” — always a good idea as something to go back to, to be honest — because this book is heavily referential, with a lot about Charlotte Perkins Gilman in it.
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Here’s the full Vox Book Club schedule for October 2020
Friday, October 16: Discussion post on Mexican Gothic
Thursday, October 29: Virtual live event with author Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Reserve your spot!
