Over the last several years, through titles like The Daughter of Doctor Moreau and, most famously, Mexican Gothic, author Silvia Moreno-Garcia has made herself an indispensable voice in the realm of horror and dark fiction. Her stories are simultaneously deeply sumptuous and starkly human, complex and relatable, the kind of fiction you can get lost in, and the kind of fiction you might never escape. Her latest, Silver Nitrate, is another entry in a growing body of work that reflects Moreno-Garcia’s tremendous skill at playing with horror conventions, building worlds, and crafting characters whose internal concerns connect beautifully to their external threats. In other words: it’s another instant classic from one of our best genre authors.
Set in 1990s Mexico City, Silver Nitrate picks up on workaholic sound editor Montserrat and her lifelong actor best friend Tristán. Their relationship is immediately fascinating, rooted in an attraction that never turned mutual and a certain kind of co-dependence that only comes from decades of knowing a person, and it’s about to take them to some unexpectedly dark places.
Through a chance encounter, Tristán meets Abel Urueta, a legendary Mexican horror director who’s lived out the last few decades in obscurity after his final film was left unfinished. After meeting both Tristán and Montserrat, Abel thinks he sees a way to complete the project at last, through the combination of Tristán’s voiceover talents and Montserrat’s gift for sound editing. But this isn’t just another half-made B-movie that never got to screens. This is a silver nitrate artifact, conceived in part by a legendary Nazi occultist who may or may not still have followers in the city decades after his death, a reel of film that might just contain the beginnings of a complex magical spell. The deeper they get into working with Abel, the more Montserrat and Tristán find that the magic might not just be real, but terrifyingly effective.
Even as she begins weaving the dark web of magic and conspiracy at the core of Silver Nitrate‘s world of faded stars and frustrated artists, Moreno-Garcia is also laying the emotional groundwork of her characters in ways that are both seamless and compelling. In prose that feels effortless in its clarity and insight, we get to know the connections that form Montserrat and Tristán’s lifelong partnership, the needs they meet within each other, the things that go unsaid, and even the pains that go unaddressed. We need to know these things because we need to understand not just how this pair will work to solve a supernatural mystery together, but why each of them is so attracted to the mystery of the unfinished film to begin with.
For Montserrat, Urueta’s lost movie is not just the fulfillment of a fangirl dream, but a chance to understand just how much she can affect her own reality, how she can control the narrative of a life she seems to be increasingly struggling with. For Tristán, it’s a chance at a new kind of acting glory, but also a glimpse at a sense of control that he’d long ago thought he’d lost, a version of stardom left behind in a new cinematic world that he almost can’t fit back into. Both of Moreno-Garcia’s protagonists are longing for something, both think they can get it through this project, and the way the book lays out the promises and pitfalls of that longing is spellbinding.
But of course, we also came to read a horror novel, and there once again, Moreno-Garcia excels. All the creeping dread, the sense of an underbelly writhing back to life beneath the mundane world, that she mastered in Mexican Gothic is once again at work here, with the same masterful grasp of historical detail and complexity that made that novel one of the must-read horror books of the last decade. When the terror kicks in, it’s so subtle and smooth that it’s almost seductive, until things turn darker, and then you’ll be grabbing for every light switch in the house.
With Silver Nitrate, Silvia Moreno-Garcia has offered us yet another must-read in her growing body of chilling, wickedly addictive fiction. Whether you’re a longtime fan or a newcomer hoping to see what all the fuss is about, you shouldn’t miss it.
Silver Nitrate is available now wherever books are sold.
Matthew Jackson is a pop culture writer and nerd-for-hire who’s been writing about entertainment for more than a decade. His writing about movies, TV, comics, and more regularly appears at SYFY WIRE, Looper, Mental Floss, Decider, BookPage, and other outlets. He lives in Austin, Texas, and when he’s not writing he’s usually counting the days until Christmas.