by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
4.3 · 4 reviewsA glamorous socialite walks into a rotting mansion and discovers the rot is alive — and it has been waiting for her.
Mexico City, 1950. Noemí Taboada is young, fashionable, and far more clever than the men around her tend to assume. When her father receives a frantic, half-mad letter from her newly married cousin Catalina — claiming the house she lives in is poisoning her — Noemí is dispatched to the remote countryside to find out the truth.
What she finds is High Place: a decaying English mansion clinging to a silver-mining hillside, presided over by the eerily controlling Doyle family. Catalina is feverish and barely lucid, the patriarch is a relic obsessed with bloodlines, and the walls themselves seem to breathe. As Noemí's nights fill with suffocating dreams and her days with mounting dread, she realizes that whatever sickness has taken hold here is not entirely of the mind.
To save her cousin — and herself — Noemí must unravel the secret buried beneath the floorboards of High Place, a horror older and stranger than the family that guards it.
First published in 2020.
4 reviews
The writing and the 1950s Mexico setting are stunning. I just wanted a bit more from the supporting cast — some characters felt like set dressing. Still glad I read it, and the ending is bold.
I love when a gothic actually commits to being horror. This one earns its scares and the reveal recontextualizes everything. Read it in two sittings because I couldn't put it down.
Moreno-Garcia's prose is lush and the setting is unforgettable. It does take a while to get going, and the first hundred pages are more mood than plot. Once the real horror reveals itself, though, it's fully unhinged in the best way.
I went in expecting a standard haunted-house story and got something far weirder and more original. The slow build is worth every page — by the final third I was genuinely creeped out. Noemí is a fantastic heroine: vain, sharp, and brave when it counts.