Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a novelist who never likes to write the same book twice. And if you’ve read more than one of her novels, you know that’s true. Since her first novel, Signal to Noise, was published in 2015, she’s tackled inter-species vampire conflict (Certain Dark Things), ancient Mayan gods coming back to life (Gods of Jade and Shadow), con artists in a Mexican tourist town (Untamed Shore), a gothic house trapping its inhabitants (the New York Times-bestseller Mexican Gothic), and a young woman unwittingly caught between the CIA and a Mexican government-backed gang (Velvet Was the Night).
Moreno-Garcia’s work often lives at the crossroads of multiple genres, including horror, science fiction, fantasy, noir, neo-noir, coming of age, and historical fiction. It’s something she says has caused difficulties in her writing career, “…because switching genre does present challenges for marketing and selling a book. You are expected to kind of specialize in a certain niche. Even if, let’s say, you’re not doing sequels, but you’re a crime writer or you’re a romance writer, when you are moving around as much as I do, it does present the issue of audience building. Is this audience that you built going to follow you to a different genre or not?”
In her newest novel, The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, Moreno-Garcia ventures into the historical sciencefiction realm of vivisection—the biological and physical manipulation of animals into animal-human hybrids who, in this case, are capable of talking and complex thoughts. Inspired by the 1896 H.G. Wells novel The Island of Dr. Moreau, Moreno-Garcia’s book is distinctly different. “For me, it’s just a launching point, a small idea,” says Moreno-Garcia, “and then I go someplace completely different.”
Set in 19-century Mexico, follows Carlota, the doctor’s daughter, and Montgomery, a troubled newcomer hired by Doctor Moreau to help with his experiments. But where Wells’ book focuses mostly on the unsettling and (un)ethical questions of the experiments, Moreno-Garcia’s novel is clever, immersive, deeply emotional, and wildly entertaining. It’s also a thought-provoking
