Silvia Moreno-Garcia writes a different genre every time and is very good at most of them, which makes her the hardest writer on this site to give a straight recommendation for.
Gothic horror, noir, vampire novel, historical fantasy, science fiction, Mayan mythology, 1970s Mexico City crime. She has published a book almost every year for a decade, and the only reliable constants are that it will be set in Mexico or by a Mexican, that the period research will be exact, and that it will not be the same as the one before.
Which means the standard advice about the Silvia Moreno-Garcia books is wrong. People say read Mexican Gothic, and they’re right that it’s the entry point, and they’re wrong that liking it tells you much about whether you’ll like the rest. A reader who loved it and then picked up Velvet Was the Night would find a completely different book.
She’s Mexican-Canadian and has a master’s in science and technology studies, which shows up in how carefully the eugenics material in Mexican Gothic is handled.
I haven’t read these. What follows is the critical consensus.
Fiction by René Rehn
The Short Version
Read Mexican Gothic. It’s the horror novel, it won the Locus and the Goodreads Choice Award, and it made her career.
Then Certain Dark Things if you want the vampires, or The Daughter of Doctor Moreau if you want the other horror-adjacent one.
And accept that the rest of the catalog is not horror and is worth reading anyway.
The Horror
Mexican Gothic (2020)
Noemí Taboada, a socialite in 1950s Mexico City, gets sent to a remote house in the mountains after a disturbing letter from her recently married cousin. High Place is the home of the Doyles, an English family who made a fortune from local silver mining and have been living there rather too long.
The argument underneath it is that the gothic house was always about colonialism, and that everyone had simply agreed not to say so. The Doyles are English, the mine killed local workers, the family’s obsession with bloodline is explicitly eugenicist, and the house is fed by all of it. That’s not subtext, it’s the plot.
The last third turns strange in a way the first two-thirds don’t prepare you for, and the body horror that arrives is the thing readers either love or bounce off. The build runs patient, atmospheric and slightly slow, and then it doesn’t.
Won the Locus Award and the Goodreads Choice Award for Horror, and it’s the book that made the current gothic revival commercially visible.
Also on gothic fiction and ghost books.
Certain Dark Things (2016)
Mexico City has banned vampires. Domingo is a teenage garbage picker. Atl is the last of a Mexican vampire lineage descended from Aztec blood-drinkers, on the run from a European rival family, and she needs somewhere to hide.
The worldbuilding is the reason to read it. Moreno-Garcia builds several distinct vampire species with different biologies, origins and territories, and the European vampire is one type among many rather than the default. It’s a narco-thriller structurally, and the pace is relentless.
It went out of print, became difficult to find, and was reissued in 2021 once Mexican Gothic made her name.
Also on vampire books.
The Daughter of Doctor Moreau (2022)
The Yucatán, 1871, during the Caste War, and it’s Wells relocated with the politics made explicit.
Doctor Moreau’s laboratory runs on money from a wealthy landowner named Lizalde, who wants a workforce for his henequen plantations that won’t organize, won’t run and can’t leave. The hybrids are that project.
Carlota is Moreau’s daughter, raised in isolation on the estate, and Montgomery Laughton is the alcoholic Englishman who manages it.
The historical frame is what elevates it. The Caste War was a genuine Maya uprising that ran for over fifty years, the hacienda system was effectively slavery, and Moreno-Garcia sets Wells’s premise inside all that, so the vivisection becomes an extension of the labor economy rather than a mad scientist’s hobby.
It runs slower than her horror and closer to a historical romance in structure, which divides readers.
What Carlota is, and when she learns it, is the best part.
The Bewitching (2025)
Three timelines and three women, and it’s her most recent novel.
Minerva is a graduate student in Massachusetts in 1998, researching a horror writer named Beatrice Tremblay, who published one novel in 1934 and claimed it was based on a real disappearance at the same college. Beatrice’s timeline runs in 1934. And Minerva’s great-grandmother Alba’s runs in rural Mexico in 1908.
The three connect through witchcraft, and specifically through the difference between the Mexican folk practice Alba knows and the New England version Beatrice encounters.
The academic material is the most convincing thing in it, and she writes research the way somebody who has actually done it does.
It’s her most explicitly horror novel since Mexican Gothic, a Bram Stoker finalist in a stacked year, and the emerging verdict rates it the better constructed of the two, while granting it lacks the single strong image that made the earlier book sell.
The Rest, Which Is Most of It
Velvet Was the Night (2021)
Mexico City, 1971, in the weeks around the Corpus Christi massacre, when a government-backed paramilitary group attacked a student demonstration and killed dozens.
Maite is a thirty-year-old legal secretary who reads romance comics and is deeply unhappy. Elvis is a young enforcer for the Hawks, the actual paramilitary unit, who loves rock and roll and doesn’t much like his job.
A woman disappears from Maite’s building, and both of them go looking for her.
Nothing supernatural in it. It’s a noir, and the reason it belongs on this site at all is the political material, which is documented history the Mexican state denied for decades.
The two leads never meet until very late, and the alternating structure is doing exactly what it should.
Among her readers, this one gets called her best-written novel and her least commercial, and the period detail on Mexico City is exceptional.
Gods of Jade and Shadow (2019)
Jazz Age Mexico, 1927. Casiopea Tun is a poor relation in her grandfather’s house in a small Yucatán town, doing the cleaning, when she opens a chest in his room and releases Hun-Kamé, the Mayan god of death, imprisoned there in pieces by his own brother.
A bone shard lodges in her hand and binds them, and she’s dying slowly while they travel across Mexico to recover the rest of him.
The Popol Vuh material is what sets it apart. Moreno-Garcia uses the actual Mayan underworld, Xibalba, and its lords and its trials, rather than a generic mythology, and the research is real.
It’s a fairy tale rather than a horror novel, and it’s her warmest book.
The road structure takes them through Mérida, Mexico City, Veracruz and Baja, and the period detail stays as careful as always.
Nominated for the Nebula and the World Fantasy Award.
Signal to Noise (2015)
Mexico City, 1988 and 2009 in alternating chapters, and it was her first novel.
Meche is fifteen, an outsider at school, obsessed with records, and she discovers with two friends that playing particular songs on a particular record player performs magic. They use it for small things, then for large ones, and it costs them the friendship.
In 2009 she comes back for her father’s funeral and has to face all three of them.
The music is the substance. Every chapter takes its title from a song, the taste is specific and unsentimental, and the vinyl-collecting material was written by somebody who did it.
It’s a first novel and reads like one in places, and it won the Copper Cylinder Award and was nominated for several others.
What it establishes is the thing all her books do, which is to take a genre premise and root it in a specific Mexican place and period.
Untamed Shore (2020), The Seventh Veil of Salome (2024) and the rest
She publishes roughly a book a year and moves genre constantly, which is the defining fact about her career.
Untamed Shore is noir, set in Baja California Sur in 1979, following a young woman who translates for a wealthy American couple and gets involved in something she can’t manage.
The Seventh Veil of Salome is Hollywood in the fifties, following a Mexican actress cast as Salome in a biblical epic, with a parallel narrative of the historical Salome.
Silver Nitrate (2023) is the closest to horror after Mexican Gothic: a sound editor in nineties Mexico City and a cursed unfinished film made by a Nazi occultist.
The Beautiful Ones is a fantasy of manners. Prime Meridian is science fiction.
She has also edited several anthologies.
The through-line is Mexico and the period research, not the genre.
Where to Start
Read Mexican Gothic, and give it the first hundred pages, because the build is slow on purpose.
If you liked the horror specifically, read Certain Dark Things or The Bewitching next.
If you liked the writing rather than the genre, read Velvet Was the Night, which is the best of the Silvia Moreno-Garcia books and has no horror in it at all.
And don’t assume that liking one of these means you’ll like the next, because that’s the one thing her catalog reliably refuses to guarantee.
The canon it belongs to is on my horror classics page. Mexican Gothic is doing something specific to my gothic fiction list.
