Silver Nitrate
Silvia Moreno-Garcia
ISBN: 9780593355367
Hardcover / Paperback / Ebook
Del Rey, July 18, 2023, 336 pages
Three years after her bestselling breakout hit, Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia is back to writing horror. Well, sort of. The publishing industry can’t resist slotting books into neat little genre boxes, but relatively few books lend themselves to such easy categorization. Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s novels are rarely among them. In the past decade she’s worked in horror, of course, but also in dark fantasy, noir, crime thriller, urban fantasy, and historical fantasy. Silver Nitrate, her ninth novel, plays with elements of all those genres, but she’s no genre dilettante; rather, Moreno-Garcia writes in a mode all her own. The genre labels are merely a marketing afterthought.
Mexico City, 1993. Two lifelong friends in their late thirties, each a distinct flavor of disaster bisexual, find themselves a bit lost. Montserrat is stubborn, introverted, abrasive, a bit of a misanthrope. She works in the male-dominated audio editing industry, where, despite her obvious talent and experience, she fights for assignments that go to less talented men. Tristán is a former soap opera star and bad boy now relegated mostly to voiceover work, haunted by the death of his starlet girlfriend ten years prior in a car accident that left him scarred both psychologically and physically.
When Tristán moves into a new apartment after yet another messy breakup, he discovers he’s now neighbors with cult horror director Abel Urueta, who invites him to dinner after they meet by way of some misdelivered mail. Montserrat is a horror fan (Tristán isn’t, but he suffers through enough horror movies at Montserrat’s side to know his stuff), so Tristán insists she join. Abel is old, lonely, and loves to tell stories. Flattered by the attention of his new friends, he’s all too happy to tell them about Beyond the Yellow Door, the movie he never completed, the one that ended his ascendant career. But there’s more to the film’s backstory than meets the eye, and Abel’s tale of the Nazi occult practitioner Wilhelm Ewers, who wrote the screenplay and hoped to use the film to cast a powerful spell before his untimely death cut production short, piques Montserrat’s interest. Abel has come to believe that the incomplete spell has become a curse, the reason his career imploded.
But Abel has a scheme, a plan to reverse his fortunes with the help of Montserrat and Tristán and bring them all luck. He saved a single reel of the film, shot on silver nitrate film and stored in his freezer (much to Montserrat’s alarm, as silver nitrate film is highly flammable and prone to spontaneous combustion—if you’re thinking this sounds like Chekov’s silver nitrate reel, well, just wait and see). He asks them to help him complete the spell by recording fresh dialogue for the key scene and syncing it to the film.
And it works—at first. Tristán gets a call from his agent about a starring role in a new show, Montserrat’s sister’s cancer goes into remission, and a local cinema inquires about running a retrospective of Abel’s films. But inevitably, things go wrong. As Montserrat delves into Ewers’s occult writings, she senses she’s being observed by a dark presence. Tristán is visited by disturbing visions of his dead lover, and Abel becomes convinced he’s about to die an untimely death. The spell worked, but not in the way they intended. Something malevolent is free now, and it has them in its sights.
From there, the novel careens into a mad blend of occultism, murder, wards and charms, spirits, and blood rituals. Montserrat and Tristán do what they must to survive, seeking help from more of Abel and Ewers’ old coven even as they come into their own powers, reluctantly and then resolutely. And when the dust has settled and the bodies have gone cold, what then? How do you return to the quotidian when you’ve seen sigils painted on phone booths and been chased by spectral hounds?
• • • •
I’ll admit that Silver Nitrate’s pacing wasn’t what I expected. The novel is slow to start—the first quarter or so is dedicated almost entirely to establishing the relationship between Montserrat and Tristán and introducing Abel. If you’re expecting jumpscares from, well, jump, just know going in that the thrills aren’t coming on page one.
The novel is divided into three sections: chapters one through five comprise the Opening Title Sequence, chapters six through twenty-seven make up Feature Film, and the final chapter stands alone under the heading Fade to Black. I don’t doubt for a minute that Moreno-Garcia knew exactly what she was doing with this structure, which cast the rather deliberate acceleration of the novel’s pace in a new light for me. It’s also an exposition-heavy book, but Moreno-Garcia has such a deft hand with atmosphere, setting, characterization, and dialogue that I found I really didn’t mind.
Character development is a particular highlight here. Montserrat and Tristán are both thoughtfully drawn, flawed, and struggling, affectionate and thorny in the way of two people who’ve been friends their entire lives. It’s a beautifully lived-in friendship: they read each other’s moods, banter and bicker, have the kind of arguments you sense they’ve been having for years, know each other’s weak spots, and love each other unconditionally. Abel’s loneliness and melancholy are palpable, and even as his hand-waving of Ewers’s obvious, malignant racism makes you want to shake him, it’s recognizable as the attitude of an older generation. Even the tertiary characters here have plenty of life and personality.
The sense of place is equally admirable. Moreno-Garcia’s affection for Mexico City (where she spent much of her youth) shines through in every descriptive detail, from apartment blocks to street vendors, even as she notes the residual damage from the devastating 1985 earthquake and the Americanization the city was already undergoing thirty years ago. And just as Mexican Gothic featured multi-layered references to the Gothic literary canon and Mexican horror history (most prominently, protagonist Noemí Taboada takes her surname from the director Carlos Enrique Taboada, mentioned several times in Silver Nitrate), Moreno-Garcia’s deep knowledge of Mexican film history is deployed to great effect here without coming across as didactic.
As I read more and more of her work, I’m increasingly fascinated by the landscape of topics and themes Moreno-Garcia engages with. As with Mexican Gothic, this story interrogates racism, colorism, sexism, and legacies of colonialism, but these threads feel a bit more naturally integrated into the plot, conversational where Mexican Gothic could sometimes feel like more of a monologue. The idea of combining visuals and audio on silver nitrate stock as a kind of alchemical ritual is an engaging one, and resonates with Signal to Noise, Moreno-Garcia’s first novel, about several Mexico City teenagers who discover they can use music as a conduit to magic. And Moreno-Garcia herself identifies the use of the color yellow as a leitmotif in her work in the Silver Nitrate author’s note. Writing can be a chaotic business, certainly, but Moreno-Garcia presents a polished, considered body of work with a consistent set of themes and motifs, something that’s rarer than it ought to be these days.
There’s no shortage of speculative novels about cursed films out there—and certainly fans of Marisha Pessl’s Night Film, Gemma Files’s Experimental Film, or Elizabeth Hand’s Hard Light shouldn’t miss Silver Nitrate—but Silvia Moreno-Garcia manages to plant her flag squarely in the midst of a number of worthy fellow books with a standout entry as original as it is entertaining.
