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Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Mexican Gothic
01:06:33
Harriett is joined by Silvia Moreno-Garcia to discuss her bestseller Mexican Gothic.
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Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
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Harriet Gilbert
Hello, welcome to BBC World Book Club, where you get to chat about their books with the world's most interesting authors. I'm your host, Harriet Gilbert. And today we're talking about the aptly named Mexican Gothic, a creepy gothic horror novel whose heroine must confront perils, both human and supernatural, in in order to rescue her cousin from the clutches of a sinister family. And joining us from her home in Vancouver to answer your questions about the book is its Mexican Canadian author, Sylvia Moreno Garcia. Sylvia, welcome to World Book Club.
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Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
Hi. Thanks for having me.
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Harriet Gilbert
Well, it's a real pleasure. I mean, I've described the novel as creepy, but also, I have to say, I found it a lot of fun to read. And I gather it was your mother who got you into gothic novels, is that right?
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Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
It was my mother who got me into horror in general. But gothic was one of the very first things I read because she introduced me to Edgar Allan Poe.
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Harriet Gilbert
Ah, right. Okay. Because I just saw you dedicated this novel to your mother, and before I knew that she'd had any influence on your writing and reading, I thought this is a quite sinister novel to dedicate to your mother.
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Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
She liked it.
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Harriet Gilbert
Well, good. Well, as well as an avalanche of short stories, Sylvia has written 11 novels, most recently the Bewitching, in which he plays with a range of genres from romance to fantasy to crime, and of course, horror. As in Mexican Gothic, this novel opens harmlessly enough in Mexico City, where our heroine wealthy Noemi Tabuada is heading home from a fancy dress party. But shortly after, a family crisis finds her traveling to an isolated house atop a mountain. The dark, crumbling ancestral home of. Of the Doyle family. Descended from English immigrants who grew rich from the area's silver mines, the Doyles are a disturbing lot. There's the ancient vampiric patriarch Howard. His austere niece. Come. Housekeeper Florence. And two cousins, Francis and Virgil. Each young man quite different from the other, but each concealing a dark secret. The problem is that Noemi's cousin has recently married Virgil and has written to Noemi's father, begging for help, saying her husband's trying to kill her. When Noemi gets home from that fancy dress party, her father hands her the letter. And Silvia Moreno Garcia, would you take over from there?
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Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
I would be glad to. Noemi had a hard time reading the words, much less making sense of the sentences. The handwriting seemed unsteady, sloppy. He is trying to poison me. This house is sick with rot, stinks of decay, brims with every single evil and cruel sentiment. I have tried to hold on to my wits to keep this foulness away, but I cannot. And I find myself losing track of time and thoughts. Please. Please. They are cruel and unkind, and they will not let me go. I bar my door, but still they come. They whisper at nights. And I am so afraid of these restless dead, these ghost, fleshless things. The snake eating its tail, the foul ground beneath our feet, the false faces and false tongues, the web upon which the spider walks, making the strings vibrate. I am Catalina. Catalina Taboada. Catalina Cata kata. Come out to play. I miss Noemi. I pray I see you again. You must come for me, Noemi. You have to save me. I cannot save myself as much as I wish to. I am bound threats like iron through my mind. And my skin, it's there in the walls. It does not release its hold on me. So I must ask you to spring me free. Cut it from me. Stop them now. For God's sake, hurry. Catalina.
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Harriet Gilbert
No wonder Noemi has to go and rescue her cousin, who sounds in a very bad way. But let's have a first question about the book. Patricia Fernandes is joining us via Zoom. Patricia.
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Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
Hi.
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Listener/Caller
Harriet and Sylvia. I'm Patricia. I'm Portuguese, currently living in Denmark. So I just read Mexican Gothic, and I really loved it because it built up this creepy gothic vibe that kept me guessing. And I kept wondering what's actually going on here. And Noemi is such a fantastic main character. She's smart Bold, stylish, definitely not someone who's going to be silenced or pushed around. She really carries the story. And I loved following her. And I was wondering, was Noemi herself inspired by anyone in particular?
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Harriet Gilbert
So, Sylvia, was Noemi inspired by anyone in particular?
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Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
The original idea for Noemi as a character came from a photograph of one of my great aunts at a party. It's a very nice party and there's a gentleman with her. But the way the photograph is framed, she doesn't matter. The focus of the full attention becomes her in a very nice ball gown. And so I thought about my great aunt's personality, which was quite strong. And it was one of the ideas for what Noemi would become. She's a socialite in Mexico city in the 1950s. And there are certain limits to what you can do in Mexico City in 1950. Women don't have the vote yet. You live with your family until you're married, and marriage is the most important choice that you'll have to make in life. You might go to school a little bit like Noemi does. She's going to university, but it's really a means to getting a husband or just a little bit of a distraction time before you really fulfill your role as mother and housewife. And within those constraints, Noemi is trying to make her own way. She's learned how to survive in that kind of high society environment, how to get her way with people and the things that work and don't work for a woman in that time period. So she knows that flirting might get her certain things because men can be very silly. She knows that seeing sometimes too smart might be bad because again, men are sometimes very silly. And so she has these ways of navigating the world. And when she goes into this strange house, she brings that knowledge with her. And she's actually not wrong. It does work to a certain extent. Some of her strategies in high place, and then there's some stuff that she has to fine tune.
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Harriet Gilbert
Okay, well, Patricia, thank you very much indeed for your question and talking about the 1950s. Our next question is precisely about that period.
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Listener/Caller
Hi, my name is Lydia Gilroy and I'm from Southampton in the uk. What I loved about Mexican Gothic was it felt so accessible as a first time horror reader. Overall, I love this book for the amount of emotional turmoil it sent me through. And I would recommend it to anybody who wants a story to stay with them like it has with me. Why did you set the story in the 1950s?
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Harriet Gilbert
Thank you. So why the 1950s
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Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
Gothic novels? Are very commonly set in the 1800s. Certainly Wuthering Heights was written back then, and Dracula was also written in the 19th century. I wanted to do 1950 because that is a point in time in which Mexico is going through a lot of societal changes. We had the Mexican revolution happening from 1910 to 1920, and then the country had huge changes after that. Not only land changes, but also society changes. And in 1950, we're seeing the emergence of what people call New Mexico. In a way, Noemi is representative of that upper middle class. Mexico is doing very well financially. It's coming in contact with other markets. It's kind of finding its identity as a new country, a relatively new country. It has existed for a long time, but after the revolution, from the 1920s to 1950s, Mexico is kind of defining itself as what it is. And it seemed an exciting moment to put the action at the beginning of the novel. And a woman from 1950 is going to be different from a woman and from 1880, Noemi really embodies this modern girl that is coming to be in society, this girl who wants to be educated, who is driving her own car and is having fun, going to parties, listening to music. So I wanted to put that kind of woman, more modern woman, in a traditional gothic setting. But I thought if I was too modern, if I had somebody from 2020, when the novel came out, I. I thought it was too much of a leap, too much of modernity. And so 1950 seemed the perfect time period between the past and the present, where we could find a heroine that was exciting and that we had some commonalities with her, but sufficiently also in the past that it wasn't so jarring going from now to basically back to the 1800s, because high place is caught in the past. It is a thing of the past that has decayed in contrast to modern magic.
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Harriet Gilbert
Doyle's house.
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Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
The Doyle's house. Yes.
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Harriet Gilbert
Well, thank you very much for that, Sylvia. And our next question actually comes from Mexico City itself. It's an email that was sent into the BBC World Book Club by Raymond Foster, who is himself a writer of horror fiction and who is a serious fan of yours, I should say. He starts, I've looked up to Silvia Moreno Garcia for a while now, and, you know, it's funny, you read a lot of authors you respect, but every once in a while you come across one who feels different, like they're kicking down a door you didn't even realize realize was locked. For me, that's Sylvia, he asks. I'm interested in the role history plays in your novels, it's never just backstory. It feels like a living, breathing character in its own right, and usually a malevolent one. Living here in Mexico City, that idea is incredibly tangible. You're constantly aware that you're walking on top of buried empires. So I have to ask, how much does that physical reality of being in a city so visibly haunted by its foundations seep into. Into how you write about the past refusing to stay dead?
- [11:36]
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
Oh, yes, you definitely see the past all the time in places like Mexico City. If you go downtown, you can see the old Grand Pyramid, but you also see the colonial buildings that came after all the way into the Porphyrion era and the modern era. For Mexican Gothic, history and place were very important because I got the original seed of this idea many, many years ago when I was a teenager and I went to Minerala del Monte, which is in Hidalgo, and it's a small town in the top of the mountains. We went there to, I think, to buy cheese. My family is from that area, and my mother wanted to get cheese there. It's a bit of a day trip, and we stopped by the English cemetery. There's an English cemetery there. It was not a tourist attraction at the time. We had to go knock on somebody's door. They had the keys, and they open the gates, and we walked in. And there it was, this lovely cemetery covered in moss with graves that. Yep, everybody had an English name. And then it was in the evening, so the fog started to come down the mountains, because, as I say, it's high up there, so it's foggy and it's chilly. And it looked like a hammer film, like Christopher Lee Crown. Dracula was gonna step out from behind a mausoleum and attack me. And I thought, this is amazing. But there is a great sense of displacement in this spot. Why is this here? Why is this English cemetery here? Of course, it's because of the mines. It's a mining area. And I knew about the mines and how they had been mined, the silver mines, for a really long period of time. But I had never really thought about the British mines. And then it made sense, like, oh, yeah, of course, there were a lot of British people in this particular area. Mineral Del Monte's nickname was Little Cornwall. A lot of the people that went to mine were from Cornwall, and that's what they nicknamed it. And if you look carefully around the town, the architecture of that town is different from the architecture of some of those other towns. And there's these little things called pastes, which are inspired by English pasties. And there's now a festival of that you can go and you eat them, all kinds of them. So there's stuff like that. And you don't think about it much. You just go through your life. I had eaten pastas before. I had never thought where these little things come from. And then you go like, oh, it's because there were British people here. They were mining and they brought some of their food and they made a cemetery for themselves. And they had these little houses that had a certain kind of architecture and style that happens all throughout Mexico City at certain points in time. History manifests itself in the land in some way or another.
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Harriet Gilbert
It's interesting. You're making it sound kind of quaint, you know, with the little pastries and the nice little houses. In this novel, it certainly isn't, because, of course, the Doyles were utterly exploitative silver miners and terrible to their indigenous workers. And that history is kind of haunting the place as well as anything else.
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Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
Yes, of course. I mean, it's quaint. Now. It's called Nahua Pueblo Magico, a magic town. And it's a tourist attraction. But a lot of these mining settlements were definitely exploitative, since first the Spaniards mined them, then other foreign powers mined them. But of course, nowadays a lot of that silver mining in that region no longer takes place or doesn't take place in that way. So now there are touristy things where you go and you buy a keychain and you don't think about all the people that went into the mines, work that mined and produced a lot of silver, and that was sent out of the country. And so nobody who worked the mines actually had a chance to profit from that silver really many times.
- [15:34]
Harriet Gilbert
Silvia Moreno Garcia, thank you very much. And we have a question now for you from Maria.
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Listener/Caller
Hello, my name is Maria Minerva, and I just want to start off by saying that I really enjoyed reading Mexican Gothic. Having this story with a strong female protagonist, a family tied to a decaying house, and a woman who has essentially been prescribed the rest cure is really reminiscent of works like Jane Eyre, the Fall of the House of Usher, and the Yellow Wallpaper. And even with these familiar tropes, you were still able to give us that suspense and anxiety we felt when we were first introduced to the genre and have probably opened up the world of the Gothic novel to those who otherwise wouldn't pick up something by the Bronte sisters or read Po outside of a school setting. And I think that is really special. We know Gothic novels are predominantly Eurocentric Right. So with this book having strong themes of postcolonialism and touching on subjects like eugenics and feminism, I was wondering if, when you were writing this, did you set out to subvert the genre, reinvent it or something else completely Interesting question.
- [16:47]
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
I love genres and thinking about genres, and in particular the Gothic, it's something that is very meaty and very chewy. There are a lot of things that you can work with. In the case of colonialism, for example, it often happens in these novels that the figure of the other, the foreigner, is a threat or something that is dangerous to the good, heroic, white, protestant upper class protagonists of these novels. So in something like Dracula, Dracula is Eastern European. In something like Jane Eyre, the mad woman in the attic is a Creole woman from the Caribbean. And you see it so on and so forth in other stories. The dangers of encountering these foreigners, these foreign forces, they might destroy you in different kind of ways. And in Mexican Gothic, I wanted to invert the relationship in which the protagonist is a Mexican woman and the danger is not some dark, dangerous, other racialized other person, but the white colonialist who is inhabiting this scary house. And also womanhood is another thing that comes up in Gothic fiction. These are narratives of women in peril. But even though the heroine might spend a long time in a creepy house, there might be. There's a lot of creepy men in Gothic novels. And she might face danger. At the end of the Gothic romance, or what is called something, the female Gothic, she becomes a figure similar to that of the final girl in the sense that she survives the narrative, she gets through the story and she has romantic fulfillment. That is one of the things that you see over and over happening again in Gothics. And so just like the final girl is a moment of catharsis in horror films, in Gothics you get something similar to that. A lot of stuff happens, but in the end, we're on this journey with somebody that is going to survive it. And so I was interested in that too, in kind of looking at how can I make a final girl in this Gothic universe, when you use that
- [19:12]
Harriet Gilbert
phrase, a final girl, is this, is this a technical term?
- [19:16]
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
Yes. There's a book called Final Girl and it's about how in horror films, like in slasher films, or if you think about the movie Alien with Sigourney Weaver, there's a heroine or in Halloween, a heroine who is the one that will survive whatever is happening on screen. She will make it to the end and she will defeat the alien monster or the serial killer. And so it's a bit of a trope that has been identified for a really long time, and it was identified, I think, in the 80s or 90s. But I believe that her grandmother was the Gothic heroine, the original woman who survived a lot of stuff and got to the end of the narrative.
- [19:58]
Harriet Gilbert
Well, we've got a question, Sylvia, now from one of your British readers, and here it is.
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Listener/Caller
Hi, Sylvia.
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Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
My name is Dara.
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Listener/Caller
I'm from Brighton.
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Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
I absolutely loved Mexican Gothic. I read it with my book club,
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Listener/Caller
and we discussed how there seems to
- [20:11]
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
have been a bit of a surge in interest in feminine and feminist horror in literature in recent years. We wondered if you agreed that that
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Listener/Caller
was the case, and if so, why
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Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
do you think the genre is resonating so strongly with contemporary audiences? So women have always been present in horror fiction. If we go back to Gothic fiction a lot, the originators of what we call Gothic fiction are women. Mary Shelley, very famous for Frankenstein, certainly, but also many other writers who contribute to this genre that is in many ways kind of the mother of what will become modern horror. Early on in the 20th century, we see a lot of female horror writers in the pulps, in magazines such as Weird Tales, contemporaries of Lovecraft who are writing and certainly present in that arena. And in the mid 20th century, we get to people like Shirley Jackson. However, even though women, I believe, are very much present in the history of horror, men are much more visible for a longer period of time. And perhaps certain questions about womanhood are not asked so explicitly in horror. And much more recently, I do think they're being asked much more explicitly, and women are getting maybe more of the spotlight that they would have had years before. So you have a new crop of women horror authors, a new generation, and they're willing to tackle a wide variety of subject matter that might not have been easy to tackle before. Anything from body horror to aging to beauty. And that's why you have, both in literature and on the screen, certain works. I went to see Demi Moore in a body horror film last year. I read a book about werewolf and menopausal horror. So that is, you know, like the change that happens there. I was reading a book that was about lesbianism and vampirism, kind of going a little bit back to Carmilla, but doing it nowadays. And so all these kinds of topics that perhaps were. We thought, oh, can we tackle this? I think women are being bolder and saying, yes, I do want to talk about. I do want to talk about female desire, about repulsion, about body horror, about Menopause. And I want to do it in a horror context. So it's an exciting time, I think, for horror fiction.
- [22:53]
Harriet Gilbert
We have a question now, which comes to you from the usa?
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Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
Hello, my name is Wade and I
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Harriet Gilbert
live in the United States, in the state of Virginia.
- [23:02]
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
What I loved most about reading Mexican Gothic, which was my first, but certainly won't be my last book by Sylvia Moreno Garcia. The setting of this book felt totally unique to me. Transposing the traditional gothic horror setting of the English manor into the mountains of Mexico gave me such a visceral engagement.
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Harriet Gilbert
Smelling and feeling the humidity and the
- [23:26]
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
mustiness of a large, dark house with
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Harriet Gilbert
no airflow in a place that the
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Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
movement of air is so vital really helped transport me into this book. Could you talk about how you brought such a place to life?
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Harriet Gilbert
You've already talked a bit about the English graveyard, the mountain and so on, and how you found that. What about the house itself? How did you go about bringing that to life? Because this is a particularly nasty house.
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Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
It's a combination of houses. It's not. People have asked me, like, you cannot go and visit it. It does not exist in.
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Harriet Gilbert
Thank goodness.
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Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
Yes. But it's the memory of several houses and the impress several houses made on me. One was a house built by an Irish man in Mexico City. And so he made a lot of money, I believe, with the railway, and he had this house built. It looks like the house from the Addams Family. You're like, holy moly. What is that?
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Harriet Gilbert
Kind of turrets and Constellation and stuff?
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Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
Exactly. It looked like a Halloween kind of house, to be honest with you. So that was one of the houses that I saw. Then I saw another house in Chicago that was a house museum, and I went into that and then some houses in Canada that I visited again. Big archways and stained glass. And frankly, also houses that have never been. Houses that appeared in Hammer films. The House of Usher, as made by Roger Corman. In a movie with its saturated colors, you know, Technicolor days, Everything is Bright. Or Dario Argento's use of color. Also in movies like Suspiria. Those houses all became my house. It's a house of the imagination, built from bits of cinema and from bits of literature that I remembered and places that I had visited to make this grand dame of a house that I thought would be beautiful and spooky. And I lived in a very moldy place when I was growing up.
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Harriet Gilbert
Very moldy.
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Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
There was a very moldy. Yeah. And I didn't know that mold was bad until I moved to Canada, and then people told me, oh, it's terrible for your lungs. And I was really. It was a very humid, cold place, and there was always black mold behind the wallpaper. I grew up with that, like ingesting all of these spores. It was just part of the environment.
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Harriet Gilbert
I hadn't realized, Sylvia, how autobiographical this novel is.
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Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
Well, maybe it wasn't so healthy. And now I wonder if I have health issues. I always go back and I think, was it that house that was full of mold? But at the time, you know, my mother would just say, oh, you just air it. It's just an old house. Airing it does not help. I think you need a major intervention. But I remember as a child, I would peel pieces of the wallpaper, and below I would see this layer of black, you know, and the books, certain books. You would grab the books, you would open them and they were all moldy. They would almost crumble in your hands from the conditions in this place. Dampness is not good for books. It's not good for records. And I don't think it's good for humans. But I remember it somewhat fondly nowadays.
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Harriet Gilbert
Well, maybe we should have another reading now from Mexican Gothic. This is where Naomi first arrives at the Doyle's house. She's with young Francis, the Doyle nephew who's come to meet her off the train from Mexico City.
- [27:05]
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
The house seemed to leap out of the mist to greet them with eager arms. It was so odd. It looked absolutely Victorian in construction, with its broken shingles, elaborate ornamentation and dirty bay windows. She'd never seen anything like it in real life. It was terribly different from her family's modern house, the apartments of her friends, or the colonial houses with facades of red desantle. The house loomed over them like a great quiet gargoyle. It might have been foreboding, evoking images of ghosts and haunted places, if it had not seemed so tired. Slats missing from a couple of shutters, the ebony porch groaning as they made their way up the steps to the door, which came complete with a silver knocker shaped like a fist dangling from a circle. It's the abandoned shell of a snail, she told herself. And the thought of snails brought her back to her childhood. Playing in the courtyard of their house, moving aside the potted plants and seeing the roly poly scuttle about as they tried to hide again. Or feeding sugar cubes to the ants despite her mother's admonishments. Also the kind tabby which slept on the bugambilla and let itself be petted endlessly by the children. She did not imagine they had a cat in this house, nor canaries chirping merrily in their cages that she might feed in the mornings. Frances took out a key and opened the heavy door. Noemi walked into the entrance hall, which gave them an immediate view of a grand staircase of mahogany and oak, with a round stained glass window on the second landing. The window threw shades of reds and blues and yellows upon a faded green carpet and two carvings of nymphs, one at the bottom of the stairs by the newel post, another by the window stood the silent guardians of the house. By the entrance there had been a painting or a mirror on a wall, and its oval outline was visible against the wallpaper like a lonesome fingerprint at the scene of a crime. Above their heads there hung a nine armed chandelier, its crystal cloudy with age. A woman was coming down the stairs, her left hand sliding down the banister. She was not an old woman, although she had streaks of silver in her hair, her body too straight and nimble to belong to a senior citizen. But her severe gray dress and the hardness in her eyes added years that were not embedded in the flesh of her frame.
- [29:28]
Harriet Gilbert
Silvia Moreno Garcia thank you. More about Mexican Gothic in a moment, but first, a very quick break.
- [29:36]
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Harriet Gilbert
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Listener/Caller
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Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
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Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
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- [30:40]
Harriet Gilbert
Welcome back to BBC World Book Club, where Silvia Moreno Garcia is answering readers questions about her unsettling novel, Mexican Gothic, in which young Noemi Tuada must try to rescue her cousin from the clutches of. Of the sinister Doyle family. And we've got a question for you now from South Africa.
- [30:59]
Listener/Caller
Hi, Sylvia. My name's Kezia and I'm from South Africa. I really enjoyed Mexican Gothic. I'm fairly new to the horror genre, and I just really couldn't decide who was creepier, the house or the people, the family. So my question for you is, what was your technique for balancing the real life horrors with the supernatural horrors of the manor?
- [31:18]
Harriet Gilbert
Well, Sylvia, you've spoken about the house, and I just wonder if you could now shift focus to this rather spooky family. I mean, how did you go about creating them?
- [31:27]
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
The Eugenesis clan of the Doyles? Yeah, I definitely thought that there is a situation of vulnerability sometimes when you go into a room. And you are, at least for me, being an immigrant in Canada, you are the one person of color in the room. And I remember one time I was invited to an event in a distant part of Canada, and I'm getting further and further away from the city. I'm in a place that I don't know. And everybody around me is kind of very different physically for me. And they're all white people. And I thought, is this a ploy maybe to cannibalize me? Which is a very fun thought to have. But, yeah. When you. When you suddenly feel the. The other, the inverse relationship. Normally I am the the other in situations, but from a point of view of myself, the people around me, they are a lot of others to me. We are not at all alike. And sometimes those relationships are not always positive. When that happens, when you find yourself in a place where people don't like the look of you, it can be pretty stressful. So I went back to that thought process. What is it like for somebody like Noemi, who has a place where she belongs in society, where she doesn't have any kind of those bodily fears to be transferred into an environment in which there is very much that fear of, like, oh, my God, I do not belong here. And these people probably have something against somebody that looks exactly like me. And I was doing also my thesis on eugenics at the time. The original title of my thesis was Magna Mater Women and Eugenics in the work of H.P. lovecraft. So I very much was thinking about relationships between what is considered the deviant and the superior standard and how that ties into ideas of race and womanhood.
- [33:35]
Harriet Gilbert
Because Noemi may very well be extremely wealthy. She comes from this Sort of prosperous family. Nonetheless, she isn't European, Anglo Saxon like the Doyles. So they see her as just inferior, full stop.
- [33:53]
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
Yes, exactly. And the scary part, for me, the really scary part is that when I was writing my thesis and it was about 2015, people told me, why are you writing about this? This is. This no longer happens. And I see regularly nowadays in the news almost the same wording of eugenicist ideas that I saw when I was studying newspapers from the 1920s, when people were saying things like, quite naturally, the Irish are an inferior people. Quite naturally, Italians are not. You know, we shouldn't allow Italians to immigrate. You know, they're kind of dirty and they reproduce too much all these ideas. And you see them reflected in current dialogue, shared online, in social media. Very much almost the same wording that I saw. And so the scary part is that things did not change that much in the 100 years that happened when eugenicist ideas were all the rage. We still have a lot of those ideas embedded in us and we repeat some of those lies and thoughts. They are like ghosts. They still haunt us.
- [35:01]
Harriet Gilbert
What's particularly creepy about the Doyles in this novel is the fact that they and this house are kind of one and the same thing in a way. I mean, that's a very clever thing you've done there.
- [35:13]
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
Yeah. The decaying kind of structure mirroring the people who live there. There is. Howard is very proud, for example, of his lineage. We're better because we're English and we're better because we're out of old stock. And meanwhile his house is falling apart. It's rotten, it's dirty, and it's a little bit. Are you looking around, man? Why are you saying that you are in any way the better or the more superior option? He's a little bit deluded, but yes, the decay of the house mirrors very much the kind of decay that this family is going through.
- [35:48]
Harriet Gilbert
Now, this next question for you, Sylvia, was emailed to BBC World Book Club from El Salvador. It comes from Isabel Amaya, who is in fact French, but she is in El Salvador teaching English, and she emailed this. I am intrigued by the snake symbolism in Mexican mythology, which is different from the biblical symbolism of the snake as temptation and corruption. Apparently it can be a positive symbol of fertility and renewal, but it also has a dualistic nature representing hell and death. So I was wondering what interpretation you've given to the recurrent image in your novel of a snake in the Doyles house, and that is true throughout the book. Noemi, notices either in the mosaic floor or in stained glass or even on a painted screen, I think, in Virgil's bedroom. There are images of snakes throughout the book. What were you seeing them as? These snakes?
- [36:46]
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
Yes, the ouroboros, the snake that eats its tail. It's an alchemical symbol. It's a symbol for infinity. But it is correct that it has associations also with Christian thought in the sense of the snake and the temptation of Eve, the snake as the devil. And in pre Hispanic culture, the associations are obviously different because mythical figures like Quetzalcoatl is the feathered snake. So there you don't get that association with evil, with Satan, instead is in association with the gods and with cycles of transformation that occur in Mexican mythology. So snakes can be very interesting if you look at them in Mexico. Sometimes you see two headed snakes that appear in certain kinds of constructions. And again, that's because of this idea of duality, of things being able to be two things at once, or two principles of nature, darkness and light, night and day, opposing each other and then coming together. That is very common in certain pre Hispanic pantheons.
- [37:58]
Harriet Gilbert
But it's this image of a snake eating its tail, which is, of course, also. Which is something which, as we discover with the novel, Howard Doyle is very interested in. It's the idea of. Of eternal life, of eternity. Yes.
- [38:10]
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
Circularity.
- [38:11]
Harriet Gilbert
Circularity. Okay, well, we've now got somebody joining us via Zoom from the United States, which is Macy Earhart, and she's there now. Macy, hello.
- [38:22]
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
Hello. How are all of you?
- [38:24]
Harriet Gilbert
Well, we're all great. You've got a question for Sylvia?
- [38:27]
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
I do. So the atmosphere that you created was so gothic and immersive. And actually this ties in with the talk of eugenics because I'm bringing up Charlotte Perkins Gilman's the Yellow Wallpaper. Did you take any inspiration from that story? Whenever I was reading the wallpaper moving,
- [38:49]
Listener/Caller
that's all I could think about.
- [38:51]
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
So I was curious if you took any inspiration from that.
- [38:54]
Harriet Gilbert
Yes, I should say that the Yellow Wallpaper is a 19th century short story in which a woman is locked into her room by her husband because he says she's going mad and she needs rest, and in fact, he drives her mad effectively. Was that partly an inspiration for you, Sylvia, for this book where. Where the wallpaper does move as Noemi starts seeing things?
- [39:14]
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
Yes. I had read A Yellow Wallpaper, especially when I was doing my thesis work, because the author was a eugenicist. Actually, she advocated for certain people kind of not being included in society and classifying People in that way. And she also wrote this creepy story about a woman who is being locked in a room and starts going mad. I thought about the yellow wallpaper for a bit. But the thing that was really much more of an influence when I was thinking about Catalina was a Latin American writer who has a story called El Almoado un de plumas, the Feather Pillow. It's very short. The author is Horacio Quiroga, and it's a woman, recently married, who starts to waste away with an illness that nobody knows what's happening to her. And the opening of that story, the first two paragraphs, really were crucial for the development of Catalina, because it says something like, and I'll paraphrase, but people should read it. It says something like, she fell in love with him because he seemed to her cruel and distant and remote. And then it talks about her marriage. And then she starts getting sick. And I was just like, that's so exciting. He's cruel and remote. And she likes that. I was like, what kind of person likes that? And then she got sick. What is happening here? And eventually we get to the answer of why she got sick. But it said something about how her temperament was, I guess, kind of romantic in that way, that when she met this guy that was a little bit unapproachable and maybe a little bit mean, she thought, he's hot. And I had the idea for Catalina and Virgil. I was like, this is the kind of woman, this kind of romantic, who would meet this guy and would be like, oh, he's so wonderful. And maybe other people would be like, no, that's like 10 walking red flags. But she goes for it.
- [41:14]
Harriet Gilbert
So that's another story, Macy, that you're going to have to read, obviously, 100%
- [41:20]
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
reading it after this.
- [41:22]
Listener/Caller
Thank you.
- [41:23]
Harriet Gilbert
We learn this from Noemi, that her cousin is very romantic. She reads all these books with sort of dark, silent, brutal men in them and thinks that this is life and she gets her comeuppance. Poor Catalina. Anyway, talking about wallpaper and yellow wallpaper for that, it reminds me this book is actually full of colour, not just wallpaper. I mean, the wallpaper in Noemi's room is. I can't remember if she describes it as being yellow and with blue laurel leaves on it or something like that. And Noemi's clothes. I mean, Noemi's got a wardrobe she's taken with her into the mountains like nobody's business. So she's, you know, coming in a pale cream blouse and a navy blue skirt or an Aquamarine nightdress. It is, oddly enough, for a book, which is so dark, thematically, it is full of colour, isn't it?
- [42:13]
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
Yes. There's a lot of color, and I admit that I think a lot about color sometimes and the colors that people like. At certain points in time, there's a color of the year, a Pantoni color of the year, if you ever see. And every year, Pantoni tells us what is the color of the year. And sometimes it's quite controversial.
- [42:29]
Harriet Gilbert
These are the colors that are going to be used by car manufacturers, by clothes designers.
- [42:34]
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
Exactly. Yes.
- [42:36]
Harriet Gilbert
Yeah.
- [42:36]
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
And Fantoni picks one every year that they say is the color. And this year it was a brown, a shade of brown. And I saw people get up in arms, the most horrid color that you could imagine. But I remember, like, in the. In the 80s, I recall a lot of wooden paneling, and in the 70s, certain tones of browns. And so it's interesting how things come in and out of fashion. Certain colors are exciting, other colors are not.
- [43:04]
Harriet Gilbert
This has got absolutely nothing to do with your novel. But how come the manufacturers of everything from fashion to cars to whatever, agree to this one color to this one color?
- [43:15]
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
I don't know if they agree or if there is some kind of unconscious consensus that we all come up with, like, yes, this is a palette that will reflect an era. Somehow, subconsciously, we all come to this agreement without speaking it. Because it is very strange. If you think about the clothing that you Wore in the 1970s or the 80s or the 90s, and you look back at it, you're like, why were we all wearing this shade of orange or of teal? And what happened? I did not agree to it. And yet somehow we were all dressed in this color. So I find that just fascinating. As a mental exercise.
- [43:52]
Harriet Gilbert
I find that quite spooky, I have to say, that we're all being lead into one color. Well, now we're going to the two young men in the Doyle cousins. One is Francis and one is Virgil. We're going to focus on Virgil for a moment because although he is actually, of course, married to Naomi's cousin, there is also an erotic charge going on between him and Naomi, which Noemi sort of doesn't like, but I don't know. Anyway, we've got a question about that, which comes from Illinois in the US Hello.
- [44:24]
Listener/Caller
My name is Stephanie Rule, and I am from Springfield, Illinois. My question for the author is, one of the most complex dynamics in the book is between Noemi and the man she sees as Vile. So Virgil yet feels drawn to. He essentially assaults her, but she's still emotionally conflicted. A part of her seems to yearn for him. Was this meant to reflect her internal trauma? Or is it more about his manipulative or supernatural control? How did you go about crafting this difficult emotional tension? Thank you. Love your book.
- [45:02]
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
So in Gothic fiction, there are certain types of characters that reappear. And one of the ones that reappears is the Byronic man, bad, mad and dangerous to know. He's very common. We go back to people like Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. We go back to Mr. Rochester, like I said, the unapproachable guy in the story that I mentioned, the young woman who likes this man because he seems cruel and is attracted to him. So this is something that reoccurs in Gothic fiction. There is this push and pull of desire and repulsion, and I wanted to work a little bit of that into the narrative. But I also wanted to have a different kind of man. And that's why we have Francis. So Virgil represents a more traditional Byronic hero, the hero that he would find very commonly in a Gothic novel. The guy that the girl desires that allows perhaps the female character to embrace certain darker aspects of her personality by liking this kind of man. But I also wanted to have a different kind of guy. And we have Francis in contrast, Rud. Virgil is definitely the old fashioned, prototypical guy that appears in these Gothic books. And it's still controversial to this very day. They announced that they're doing a new version of Wuthering Heights. And I saw these people basically fighting online with some people saying Wuthering Heights is not romantic. It's about this horrible, abusive man and some other people basically saying he's completely hot, I want him kind of situation. So we have not come to a consensus yet even nowadays about these kinds of men. And they're thorny, chewy, difficult situations when you look at it. And women, how they desire or are repulsed, want or do not want, do they really want? Is there something else at play that is making us want these men? Has society made us, like, brainwashed us and made us want these guys and we should not? And so because it's such a thorny area, I think it's delicious to explore.
- [47:15]
Harriet Gilbert
Thank you very much, Sylvia. We've got a question for you now from New Mexico in the us Hi,
- [47:20]
Listener/Caller
my name is Leslie from New Mexico.
- [47:22]
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
First and foremost, I really enjoyed your novel. I love Noemi with her egotism and pragmatism.
- [47:28]
Listener/Caller
I love the way you utilize the realities of racist ideologies as well as patriarchal norms to contribute to the overall horror that is the Doyle family.
- [47:37]
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
And my fingers are crossed that at the end of the day, Noemi got
- [47:40]
Listener/Caller
to pursue her studies. I mean, she worked hard to do
- [47:43]
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
what her father asked of her. I think she's earned it. My question for you is, what would you say was your primary inspiration when you were writing the Doyles? Was there a particular piece of literature
- [47:53]
Listener/Caller
or history that helped you to plant that seed or to help you plant that spore?
- [48:00]
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
Well, I spoke already about eugenicism and how that helped shape some of the fears and some of the thoughts that are expressed by the characters. Howard Doyle. Howard's first name, Howard, is from HP Lovecraft. I actually named Howard Doyle after Lovecraft and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I kind of smooshed them into a single name because I said it was my two favorite racist people put together into one, which is a joke, But I was remembering some short stories that I had read about both of them, which had some kind of disturbingly racist ideology and some of the things that I knew about them. So really, Howard Doyle is kind of this distillation of all the things that I found disturbing sometimes about not only these men, maybe some other men, but especially I was thinking about these two men and some of the fiction that they wrote and kind of smushing them together into a single guy.
- [49:03]
Harriet Gilbert
Well, let's have another reading now from Mexican Gothic, featuring the dreadful patriarch Howard, this really sort of desiccated, sexually predatory man. And here he's showing Noemi the portraits of his two wives, sisters whom he married one after the other. I mean, the first one died, and then he married the other one. And he's insisted on sitting right next to her while he shows her these portraits.
- [49:28]
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
Beautiful, my beautiful darlings, the old man said, his hand still resting atop Noemi's as he turned his eyes back toward the paintings, his fingers rubbing her knuckles. Did you ever hear about Dr. Galton's beauty map? He went around the British Isles compiling a record of the women he saw. He cataloged them as attractive, indifferent, or repellent. London ranked as the highest for beauty. Aberdeen the lowest. It might seem like a funny exercise, but of course it had its logic. Aesthetics again, Noemi said, as she delicately pulled her hand free from his and stood up as if to take a closer look at the paintings. Truth be told, she didn't like his touch, nor did she much enjoy the faint, unpleasant odor that emanated from his robe. It might have been an ointment or medicine that he'd applied. Yes, aesthetics. One must not dismiss him as frivolous. After all, didn't Lombroso study men's faces in order to recognize a criminal type? Our bodies hide so many mysteries, and they tell so many stories without a single word, do they not? She looked at those portraits above their heads, the serious mouths, the pointed chins and luscious hair. What did they say in their wedding dresses as the brush stroked the canvas? I am happy, unhappy, Indifferent. Miserable. Who knew one could construct a hundred different narratives? It didn't make them true. You mentioned Gamyu when we last spoke, howard said, grabbing his cane and standing up to move next to her. Noemi's attempt at distance had been in vain. He crowded her, touched her arm. You're correct. Gamyu believes natural selection has pressed the indigenous people of this continent forward, allowing them to adapt to biological and geographical factors that foreigners cannot withstand. When you transplant a flower, you must consider the soil, mustn't you, Sylvia?
- [51:28]
Harriet Gilbert
Thank you very much indeed for that. Howard is such an unpleasant person. Anyway, to our next question, which comes from Canada.
- [51:36]
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
Hello, my name is Marie, and thanks for the opportunity to ask some questions. I love this book. Mexican Gothic. I lived in a house that was falling apart due to mold and weeds and rodents, so I could smell this book. Thank you for the vivid portrayal. My question is about, really, the theme of sexual violence and the parallel with colonialism. I wondered if you wanted to comment more on that. On that taking without consent that seemed to be happening on both the interpersonal level and, of course, in the broader context of colonial Mexico.
- [52:18]
Harriet Gilbert
So the parallels between sexual violence and colonial violence. Colonialism, yeah.
- [52:24]
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
So there is a lot of taking when you're talking about mineral wealth, for example. When you take things from the earth, you don't necessarily ask people permission to do it. Sometimes you pollute the earth while you're doing that. But there's also a lot of taking with colonialism of women without their consent. You find in many Eugenesis works actually, that certain women that are considered inferior, as would be the word that a neogenesis would use, the connotation is that they're sexually easy, sexually available. And so there is this great fear of white womanhood, of white women have to be protected. We have to make sure that they are not polluted, that they are not sexually violated. But these other women, women which we consider inferior, maybe because of color or because of disability or maybe because they're even from a lower social class, they Are there to be plundered sometimes in many ways there is nothing there to protect, nothing valuable that we would defend. And that is why you see sometimes in lynchings in the United States, in many cases that a woman might say men would kill a man just because they thought that the honor of a woman was being besmirched. The famous case of Emmett Till in the United States, which was quite recent, in the 1950s, they thought he had looked at a woman or spoken to her in a way that was perhaps disrespectful, and he was murdered for that reason. And behind all that is that idea of white womanhood being something precious. The fear of other people of colors, people who should not be in contact with this woman, coming in contact with her. However, nobody has any problems with violating, for example, enslaved women in the 1800s in the Antebellum South. There are a lot of mixed race children that come out of those unions, including the children of a President Jefferson in the United States. Nobody seems to question those relationships as being unfair as a black woman being violated. That seems to be the natural order. These women are here for being used. And you see that language in a lot of 19th century liter and early 20th century literature. It's just like, well, these women that come from other spaces are much looser and there's no problem if you use them any way that you want. So I was very much thinking about that when I was considering Mexican Gothic.
- [54:56]
Harriet Gilbert
Yes, Silvia Moreno Garcia, thank you very much indeed. And we're joined now on Zoom by Athena. Where are you joining us from?
- [55:05]
Listener/Caller
Hi, I'm joining from Toronto, Canada. Nice to meet you guys.
- [55:10]
Harriet Gilbert
What's your question for Sylvia?
- [55:13]
Listener/Caller
So Sylvia, I too love Mexican Gothic. It was my first gothic horror novel. I picked it up thinking historical fiction. And I had to put this book down a couple times because I genuinely got scared. But I'm okay now, so don't worry. My question to you is actually regarding the mushrooms because they play such a huge important role in symbolism and everything. But I was very curious to know where the inspiration to use them came from.
- [55:40]
Harriet Gilbert
I have to say we had a similar question from a regular listener to World Book Club, Maggie Mitchell, who wants to know about these mushrooms too that permeate the Doyles house.
- [55:49]
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
Yes, I like mushrooms and sometimes people think I don't because of this book, but I actually do like them quite a bit. There's a researcher at the University of British Columbia where I used to work. I used to work in the science department. And there's a researcher who Was in forestry. And she came up with this theory that trees, forests basically use mycelial networks, that is to say, mushroom networks, to send information from one tree to the other. And it's basically like the forest Internet, the worldwide wood web is what I've heard it called. If there is a pathogen in one side of the forest, perhaps the tree will tell some other trees on the other side of the forest. Pathogen is coming. Maybe send more resources there. It's very interesting. We don't quite understand all of it yet, but I like that idea of a web of things being connected. And then I had read a couple of books that talked about hallucinogenic mushrooms and how they might have been used in religious rituals. But also maybe these altered states are what essentially created religion. Maybe somebody ate a mushroom, thought that they were communicating with a higher force, and came up with the idea of gods or a God. So I read a couple of books about that. I found them very interesting. And that came in to be as part of Mexican Gothic. There is also, I think, a rich kind of back history of mushrooms in science fiction and horror fiction and fantasy fiction. So we do find that also happening historically. And so it was a whole bunch of things. Both the science that I had learned, some of my ideas about hallucinogenics and altered states, and some of the great history of mushroom fiction. One of the only things that has ever scared me was a Japanese horror movie, Matango, where people literally become mushrooms. It's an old movie, but. But the first time I saw it, I was so creeped out by it. Like these giant mushrooms emerging and chasing people through a jungle.
- [58:02]
Harriet Gilbert
I have to say that the mushrooms in Mexican Gothic are pretty creepy, Particularly when one discovers where they come from, which I won't go into. But, Athena, I'm just wondering. You obviously found them creepy too. Has it stopped you eating mushrooms?
- [58:16]
Listener/Caller
No, actually, I really love mushrooms. My pizza topping is pepperoni and mushrooms.
- [58:22]
Harriet Gilbert
My go to.
- [58:24]
Listener/Caller
I just thought it was such a unique aspect of the book, like something so random, because usually something you expect is like ghost or something related to a typical haunting. But yeah, mushrooms. It was just so wild. But it was just such a fun read at the same time.
- [58:42]
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
And they're easy to grow.
- [58:45]
Listener/Caller
I know. I get them in my backyard sometimes.
- [58:47]
Harriet Gilbert
You were talking about damp earlier. They're easy to grow by accident. I've had them in a cupboard once. Not intentionally. So maybe I'm less fond of mushrooms than you both are. Anyway, thank you, Athena. Thank you very much for your question. There is one Halfway decent member of the Doyle family who is young Francis Doyle. And when push comes to shove, he actually does come down sort of half heartedly on Noemi's side against his family. And this next question concerns Frances.
- [59:15]
Listener/Caller
Hi, this is Brittany Mondini from Dallas, Texas. Thanks for having me on the show. And Sylvia, I wanted to say how much I appreciated Mexican Gothic. It's such a fresh and thought provoking take on the horror genre. My question is about the romance between Frances and Noemi. Their connection is very subtle, yet powerful. How did you approach capturing the complexity of their relationship, especially amid the dark and intense atmosphere of the novel?
- [59:46]
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
Yeah, so Francis is definitely not like Virgil. So he's not supposed to be the vironic romantic hero. He's a completely different kind of guy. I wanted him to be somebody that Noemi. Noemi, I think, is someone that has maybe had a lot of boyfriends or dated around, but hasn't had a lot of serious relationships. There's a bit of a fear of commitment, but I also believe she has kind of gone for the pretty boys and maybe not so much for people that are more compatible intellectually with her. And Francis definitely has that scholar's husband thing going for him. So for her, I know some people have told me, well, why does she like him if she says he's so ugly all the time? And it is true she doesn't find him particularly attractive compared to the men, that she is kind of useful. But you have to realize that for her, probably her physical ideal is somebody like Pedro Infante, you know, like a dark haired, dark eyed, strong man with a tan. And then there's this thin, extremely pale boy. And so she's looking at it and going like, not really. And he has a funny chin. But I do think that sometimes we meet somebody and we don't think, oh, they're the hottest person in the world. But as you talk to them, maybe they're charming or they're interesting and suddenly they become more beautiful because you can see a part of them that you did not see before. And I wanted that to be part of knowing me. And part of her maturing that happens through this journey is that she's able to see something beautiful in Frances and find him kind of like a more interesting guy than just going for the obvious physically attractive Virgil, who is not very beautiful inside.
- [61:50]
Harriet Gilbert
You do something quite interesting, which is that you leave the relationship between Naomi and Francis just a bit uncertain at the end. And one of your readers wanted more. She's from Carlisle in the north of England. And here she is. To ask her question.
- [62:07]
Listener/Caller
Hello, my name is Ali from Carlisle, and in my review I mentioned I really wish there was an epilogue. What future do you see for Naomi and Frances? Would he have continuous issues with the fungus? Would Normie's dad accept him? And how would Catalina react to the relationship, considering he did help keep her character captive? And was Naomi influenced by the fungus at all to start the relationship with Frances?
- [62:32]
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
Yes. I definitely think it's going to be a very funny conversation when her dad gets there and is like, what the hell happened here? But, no, I didn't want to show more of that. I like endings that are a bit ambiguous, and we don't know at the very ending whether this is happily ever after, happy for 24 hours. Terrible things are going to happen. We just don't know. But there is just this one kind of moment of maybe it will be okay. Maybe we will not repeat the same pattern of our ancestors and go through the same cycle again, but maybe we will. But I didn't want to have a definite answer for that. Yeah. And some people have asked me exactly what happens next and would he really be a good partner for her? And my answer is that I think that he would be a very good scholarly collaborator. We had that relationship very much in the past, where women were the secretaries to their scholarly husbands. They were the ones who typed the manuscript, who cleaned the manuscript, who got the things in order for their husbands so that they could have a scholarly life, good academic existence. And I think Francis would be a very good scholarly husband. I believe he would type the manuscripts, he would arrange the notes. He would make sure that there's dinner on the table. He would completely support. Support that type of life because he is scholarly himself, so he wouldn't frown upon that. He wouldn't be like, why is there no dinner on my table, lady? Kind of situation. He would understand. He would say, oh, yes, your thesis is due. We absolutely have to, you know, get those flashcards in order, put that manuscript in shape, I get it, kind of situation. So I think he would be a good match in that sense, as opposed to maybe some other guy who might be like, oh, I wanted roast beef tonight. Why is there not the perfect roast beef at my table tonight?
- [64:32]
Harriet Gilbert
No, it's Noemi who's going to be saying, hey, where's the supper?
- [64:36]
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
Where's supper? Yeah.
- [64:37]
Harriet Gilbert
Finally, we have a question for you about Mexican Gothic, which comes from Pakistan.
- [64:43]
Listener/Caller
Hello, my name is Maliha Rao. I am dark fantasy and horror reader and writer from Pakistan. Pakistan And I have been a huge fan of Silvia Moreno Garcia since I discovered silver nitrate. And so the question I have is, as a person of color, because I'm also a person of color from Pakistan and a woman. How difficult is it as an author, especially in the horror or in the dark fantasies fantasy community, Is it find a breakthrough? Because that is something I'm very curious about and I do want to know from someone who has gone through it all and have experienced it and have become something so amazing, like you. Thank you so much for this opportunity and take care. Lots of love.
- [65:42]
Harriet Gilbert
Well, how difficult is it to have a breakthrough as a woman of color, as a writer of horror?
- [65:48]
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
Well, it's difficult to be a writer at any point in time. I started writing short stories in 2006 and I was one of the only writers of color in the speculative scene, writing horror, writing fantasy or science fiction. And I knew all of the other people because there were very few of us. And it quickly became the case that now I go into bookstores and I look at a shelf and I'm like, oh, I don't know who that is, but they are an Indian writer and they're writing fantasy or they are in Canada, but they might be originally from the Caribbean. So it definitely has expanded the vision, I think, of speculative fiction to include a lot of other people. It's always still difficult because there are so many books published every year. It's hard to get representation. But I would say that sometimes I meet people and they talk themselves out of something before they even do it. So they'll tell me, oh, it's just so difficult getting an agent, having a book published. I don't think it'll ever happen for me, so I'm not even going to try. And. And I always say, well, you should try. I did not get an agent with my first novel. I did not get a lot of attention with my first few books. Mexican Gothic was my sixth novel, which got more attention than the other ones. And so you shouldn't kind of write yourself out of the story before the story even begins. So I would say give it a try. And one of the good things about living nowadays in this hyper connected world is that we are able to more easily connect and talk and build those relationships and get an agent and get an editor and do the edits. That makes it a lot more possible, I think, for people of color and marginalized people from around the world to have a chance. There are a lot more avenues. I think that there would have been just a few years ago.
- [67:42]
Harriet Gilbert
Well, on that that seriously encouraging note, we have to leave it next time. The Nigerian born novelist Oinkon Braithwaite will be joining us to answer questions about My Sister the Serial Killer, a darkly comic thriller about exactly what the title says. If you'd like to speak with Oyinkan about the book, nothing easier. Just start by emailing your questions for her to worldbookclubbbc.co.uk that's World Book Club all one word BBC.co.uk we'll take it from there and we would really love to have you on the programme. Meanwhile, wherever you get your podcast, there are more than 250 other world book Clubs for you to download. Interviews with a wide range of authors from N. K. Jemisin to Mohsin Hamid, from Lee Child to Wally Schoinker. And do take a moment to rate the podcasts for now though, from me, Harriet Gilbert and producer Elizabeth Ann Duffy. Thank you to our sound engineer Keith Graham, to all you members of BBC World Book Club, wherever you are, and an especially massive thank you to this month's guest, Silvia Moreno Garcia.
- [68:48]
Advertiser/Promoter
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