Meditating

title: “Mexican Gothic-Silvia Moreno-Garcia” layout: note date: 16-03-2023 permalink: tags: [BookNotes] last_modified_at: 2023-12-08 12:09 nsplants the tropes of gothic novels to Mexico, then completely turns them upside down. It is a testament to how well the novel lays out it’s clues and breadcrumbs that I didn’t see the twist coming, but it made total sense. A fun, well written genre mash up, I breezed through this in a couple of days and found it really enjoyable.

5 things to steal

• Use tropes against reader. Distract them into thinking they know where the story is going
• Pull the rug out from under the reader.
• Change genre halfway through story
• Seed ideas into early part of novel so genre shift makes sense.
• Make metaphors literal and horrible- in this case the rot of colonialism becomes actual rot.