TITLE: Silver Nitrate
AUTHOR: Silvia Moreno-Garcia
368 pages, Del Ray, ISBN 9780593355381 (paperback, also hardcover, e-book and audio)
MY RATING: 5 stars out of 5
MY THOUGHTS: Sometimes, horror slams into your life blatantly and unavoidably, and sometimes it slowly insinuates its way into your life, growing incrementally with plenty of easy-to-miss warning signs. Thus it is in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Silver Nitrate – a subtle sense of unease at the start grows into full-blown supernatural horror by the end, a journey that, like the characters, you won’t be able to stop once you start no matter how many signs there are warning you away.
In 1990s Mexico City, Monserrat (a movie sound editor), her childhood best friend Tristán (a struggling actor), and Abel (a retired director) uncover the secrets of a “lost film” from the 1960s, a film Monserrat and Tristán have been obsessed with since high school and which Abel actually directed but left incomplete, leading to the realization that magic is real and to a cult that wants to bring their dead leader back to life. Along the way there are magical changes of fortune, ghosts, and dark presences.
I’ve become quite a fan of “lost film” and “forgotten television series” stories over the past few years (see: Will Ludwigsen’s Acres of Perhaps, for instance), and I was already a big fan of Silvia Moreno-Garcia (I haven’t read everything she’s ever written, but I’m working on it), so of course the combination of author and concept would catch my eye. Silver Nitrate, in case you haven’t already figured it out, did not disappoint.
Moreno-Garcia’s characters are always nuanced and complex. Montserrat, Tristán, and Abel are no exceptions. Montserrat juggles frustrations with family and a misogynistic boss with her self-admittedly unrequited love for Tristán. She could do better on both the employment and romantic fronts if she could just let go of these things/people she loves, but she can’t bring herself to break from either. Tristán had it all as a devilishly handsome soap opera star in a tempestuous relationship with his co-star girlfriend until a car accident took both away from him. He too cannot let go: of the love, of the guilt, of wanting to regain his career. And Abel – well, Abel starts the story at the opposite end of the emotional spectrum from Montserrat and Tristán, having given up career and love and become an alcoholic recluse … until they come along to rekindle his interest in his lost project. They are not quite “three points on a triangle,” but they are on an emotional continuum. Moreno-Garcia illustrates the push and pull they exert on one another in small moments and large confrontations that keep the book’s emotional stakes high.
That emotional push and pull also makes it easy for each of them to ignore the warning signs that things are getting dangerous, and that what seemed like a light bit of magic at first is pulling them into something darker and potentially fatal. I don’t want to say too much about the reveals in the last quarter of the book, but I will say Moreno-Garcia is great at blending the literary equivalent of a “jump scare” with the kind of psychological horror that typically eschews jump scares. And she kept me guessing right up to the denouement as to how things were going to play out.
Fans of psychological and supernatural horror, fans of “lost film” stories, and fans of period pieces (yes, as much as it pains me to say it, stories set in the 1990s are now “period pieces”) will all find Silver Nitrate a worthy read. Check it out.
I received an electronic advance reading copy of this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. I received and read the ARC before the book was published but dropped the ball on posting the review. The paperback edition was released on May 21st, 2024, and is available in all the usual places. Also, Moreno-Garcia’s newest novel is The Seventh Veil of Salome, which also has to do with a classic period of filmmaking. I’m hoping to read that soon.