About This Book
When Noemí Taboada receives a desperate letter from her newly-wed cousin, she travels to High Place—a crumbling mansion in the Mexican mountains—expecting to find a troubled marriage. What she finds is something far older and stranger: a family with secrets buried in the walls, a patriarch whose interest in her feels predatory, and a house that seems to breathe. Moreno-Garcia sets her horror not in jump scares but in slow dread, the kind that builds through wrong glances and rooms that don't quite make sense, until you realize the danger is everywhere and has been from the first page.
What makes the novel so effective is how precisely it weaponizes its Gothic influences. The decaying English manor, the isolated heroine, the brooding family heir—all the familiar architecture is there, but Moreno-Garcia filters it through 1950s Mexico and uses it to interrogate colonialism, eugenics, and the violence that wealth can quietly sustain. The prose is controlled and atmospheric without ever tipping into purple excess, and Noemí herself is sharp enough to keep you grounded even as the reality around her gets stranger and stranger.