Mexico fertile ground for Gothic horror in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s work

Article content

In Latin America, science fiction and horror aren’t categories like they are here. So Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s exposure to genre fiction was organic, as something that wasn’t ghettoized.

“There were a lot of genre books around the house, in Spanish and in English,” says the author, who was born and raised in Mexico. “My parents read a lot. I had access to those books, and I watched a lot of movies. I’ve always liked science fiction and fantasy, and I’m very fond of horror.”

Moreno-Garcia touches on all of these genres in her short stories, over 70 of them, and her novels. She has been writing seriously since 2006, with the publication of her first short story, and around the time she moved to Vancouver.

This year looks to be a banner one for Moreno-Garcia. Her story Prime Meridian will appear in the anthology The Best of World SF, slated for June 1 publication. Tor is reissuing two of her older novels, Untamed Shore and The Beautiful Ones, in paperback. And her 2020 novel Mexican Gothic arrives in paperback June 15 and has been optioned for a TV series.

“It just organically grew,” she says of the book’s success. “It had a lot of good reviews. It’s the sort of book where people who hate it will hate it. But people who love that sort of experience, the Gothic experience, really, really love it and tell others. It is the kind of thing that you will not be lukewarm about.”

Article content

Although she now lives in Canada, much of her work is set in her homeland. Mexico is fertile ground for the author, who set Mexican Gothic and the upcoming Velvet Was the Night (Aug. 17 publication date) in the country. Both draw on real historical incidents as well. The events of Mexican Gothic take place in 1950, following the decline of activity in the British mines of the 19th century and after the Mexican Revolution. In Velvet Was the Night, the instigating incident is The Corpus Christi Massacre, or El Halconazo, a 1971 protest by students in Mexico City. The protest turned violent when the government sent in a paramilitary group. They killed 120 students.

Moreno-Garcia says she has experienced some pushback for setting her books in Mexico. “Even recently, I have heard things like, ‘This is unsellable because it’s set in Mexico.’ That happened with Velvet Was the Night and my previous noir. I heard editors say that things set outside of the United States don’t sell. Or nobody’s going to care about this sort of story. It is getting better. I have seen a lot of changes in the relatively short time I’ve been writing.”

Case in point: The Best of World SF. The anthology, in which Moreno-Garcia’s future-Mexico-set short story Prime Meridian will appear, is a showcase for work by a diverse selection of authors. Edited by Israeli author Lavie Tidhar, it’s meant to be the first volume in a new series, one that follows Tidhar’s previous series The Apex Book of World SF.

Article content

“He is really a pioneer,” Moreno-Garcia says. “He was looking at writers from Malaysia, from Africa, from China, from Japan when no one was really doing that. You might get some stories here and there from other parts of the world. But the way that he constructed this global structure of science fiction and looked at science fiction not as a monoculture but as a vibrant sphere for people to speak from all over the world, and the promotion he gave that over the long term and pushing it on and on in an independent space, is exciting to see and inspiring.”

CLICK HERE to report a typo.

Is there more to this story? We’d like to hear from you about this or any other stories you think we should know about. Email vantips@postmedia.com.