I've only read one book by Mexican-born but Canadian-resident Silvia Moreno-Garcia and it's not what you might expect. 2020's 'Mexican Gothic' is the one that seems to have garnered plenty of notice, but I reviewed the one before that, 'Gods of Jade and Shadow'. Like both of those books, this has a historical element, being both a period piece and a nod to a particular era of literature. In this instance, that nod is an obvious one, to H. G. Wells's 'The Island of Dr. Moreau', which I haven't read in far too long, though there's also a conspicuous nod to the Universal film adaptation, 'Island of Lost Souls', the most banned of the Universal Horrors of the thirties.

Dr. Moreau is here, of course, as the mad scientist/misunderstood genius, depending on your point of view, which because of the genre generally translates to a moral stance. However, he's not the primary character this time because, as the title suggests, that's his daughter, here named Carlota, though she has been given other names in other treatments of this idea, such as Megan Shepherd's The Madman's Daughter, in which she's Juliet. Carlota is a teenager when we first meet her and a young lady for most of the novel, one who's been sheltered in her father's compound all her life.

Beyond her father, who is increasingly happy for her assistance in his work, she spends her time in the company of either Dr. Moreau's mayordomo, of which there have been two, and a collection of hybrids. As you might expect, these are the uplifts; human beings mixed with animals. The technology here has roots in Charles Darwin's theory of pangenesis, which suggested the existence of gemmules, particles of inheritance exuded by every cell in the body. Moreno-Garcia doesn't go into the science, so what we hear is a sort of gene therapy, which is not strictly true but works fine as the context. It's suitably alien to us today as a concept, unlike transplantation, which has dated horrendously as a "man is stepping in God's shoes" concept, given that it's routine surgery nowadays.

We join the story as the second of those two mayordomos joins Dr. Moreau's household. The first, who was named Melquíades only has a peripheral part to play, one that's conducted entirely offscreen, but the second, Montgomery Laughton, is crucial to the story. Montgomery was the name of Dr. Moreau's assistant in the original 1896 novel and Laughton is a nod to the actor who played the doctor in 'Island of Lost Souls', Charles Laughton, so I presume we're supposed to acknowledge both book and film as a pair of key sources.

Montgomery Laughton is a character a writer can get her teeth into, a capable and principled man but one who has lost his wife because of his inability to keep her, shall we say, at a standard of life to which she had become accustomed; and he's still grieving her departure, writing frequent letters to her in his head. He's overly fond of the bottle and he's quite a habitual gambler, even though he's terrible at it. However, he gets his job done and his heart is in the right place, so he's a capable male lead, even if he alternates as our narrator with his master's daughter.

I mean that literally, by the way, because the chapters actually alternate between those told by Carlota and those told by Laughton. This is confusing initially, because their accounts aren't truly sequential. In many instances, they overlap and sometimes even backtrack. In the second chapter, for instance, I read about the moment when Laughton first meets Dr. Moreau and thought, hang on a mo, didn't he do that in the first chapter? And yes, he did, but that was told from Carlota's perspective instead of his and we were being treated to both viewpoints. This doesn't persist as a problem and, once I realised what was happening with that first instance, it actually helps the story progress because we get two perspectives to everything and that's often important.

We aren't given chapters from the perspective of the hybrids but their views do become obvious when they need to be. Two are more highly developed than the rest, so they're more prominent in the story, as well as in Carlota's life, as her closest confidantes and playmates. That's Cesare and Livia, though an in-house tradition is for the housekeeper, Ramona, to give all the hybrids nicknames, so they're usually Cachito and Lupe. They help out a lot, so they appear to us as the help, even if Carlota doesn't see it in quite that light, at least initially. Everyone's situation changes a lot during these pages.

Part of that comes through the twist in the tale, which I believe is supposed to be something we figure out gradually from the telegraphing but I took as a given from the beginning. Mostly it's just inevitable because Dr. Moreau's laboratory isn't going to stay isolated forever. Someone's always going to show up at some point and set a chain of events into motion. It just happens to be Eduardo Lizalde, the son of Dr. Moreau's patron, Hernando Lizalde.

And, at this point, I should mention the setting, because that's rather changed from the other versions of the story. Traditionally, Dr. Moreau was an Englishman who moved his laboratory to a remote island in the southern Pacific after his work prompted much controversy. Here, he's a Frenchman who shifted to the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, not strictly an island but one considered such by early mapmakers who didn't know better. The rancho is called Yaxaktun and it's so remote that their nearest neighbours are Mayan natives fighting a guerrilla war against the occupying Spanish.

The Lizaldes are rich and important Spanish landowners, so representing one side of the ongoing class struggle while the local Mayans occupy the other. The Moreaus are both literally and figuratively stuck in between them and that proves to be their downfall, because, when the world shows up at their door, it's because Eduardo Lizalde is hunting the rebel Mayans of Juan Cumux. Laughton tries to send them on their way but, when Carlota Moreau walks out to defuse the situation, it's the beginning of the end for Yaxaktun because she's a beautiful young lady with haunting eyes that young Eduardo can't resist falling into.

The social commentary is not overt but it's deep and it makes this change of location a very good one. Moreno-Garcia writes time and place really well and she makes good choices for everything all the way down to the nationalities of the characters. The Yucatán was conquered by the Spanish but the British helped the Mayans, at least until they did a deal with the Mexicans and everything changed again. It's appropriate that Laughton is British but Moreau is not, for instance, and that the Lizaldes are Spanish. There's plenty of terminology used here that I don't recognise but everything's understandable from the context, whether that's food or swimming holes or socio-political dynamics.

I'm a sucker for Victorian genre fiction and 'The Island of Dr. Moreau' is one of the pioneers of a horror/science fiction crossover that's still vibrant to this day. Sequels or prequels don't tend to work too well to Victorian novels like this one, but reimaginings can be fascinating and this is definitely one, a clean and consistent novel from an author who is clearly developing a welcome voice, taking period yarns or genres and retelling them from a period Mexican cultural perspective. I liked 'Gods of Jade of Shadow' a lot, but I like this one even more. Clearly I should split the difference and pick up 'Mexican Gothic' and 'Velvet Was the Night'. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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