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🍃 Branches (key topics): Gothic, Horror, Haunted House, Rot, Racism, Mexico, You are the Ghost in This House, Family
🍂 Roots (Status): #seed
🌰 Source: Moreno-Garcia, S. 2020. Mexican Gothic.

Notes

Noemí tried to think of the house filled with the noise of children's laughter, children playing hide and seek, children with a spinning top or a ball between their hands. But she couldn't. The house would not have allowed such a thing. The house would have demanded they spring from it fully grown. (Mexican Gothic, Moreno-Garcia, 45)

Noemí clapped the book shut and looked away, her eyes landing on the corner in her room where the rose-colored wallpaper was stained black by mold. And as she looked at it, the mold moved. (Mexican Gothic, Moreno-Garcia, 191)

"The fungus, it runs under the house, all the way to the cemetery and back. It's in the walls. Like a giant spider's web. In that web we can preserve memories, thoughts, caught like the flies that wander into a real web. We call that repository of our thoughts, of our memories, the gloom" (Mexican Gothic, Moreno-Garcia, 211)

• The Magnus Archives

"Wood and glass and a roof do not constitute a world," she countered. "You're not an orchid growing in a hothouse. I'm not letting you stay. Pack your prints or your favorite book or whatever you wish, you are coming with us"
"you don't belong here, Noemí. But I do. What would I do outside?" he asked.
"Anything you want"
"But that is a deceiving idea. You are right to think that I was grown like an orchid. Carefully manufactured, carefully reared. I am, yes, like an orchid. Accustomed to a certain climate, a certain amount of light and heat. I've been fashioned for a single end. A fish can't breathe out of water. I belong with the family"
"You're not an orchid or a fish"
(Mexican Gothic, Moreno-Garcia, 250)