Gary K. Wolfe Reviews Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Silver Nitrate, Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Del Rey 978-0-59335-536-7, $28.00, 324pp, hc) July 2023.

Since her first novel in 2015, Silvia Moreno-Garcia has demonstrated an almost aston­ishing degree of versatility, ranging from historical fiction to vampire horror to romantic noir, classic Gothic, sword and sorcery, and even H.G. Wells with last year’s The Daughter of Dr. Moreau. Characteristically, she has invested these familiar genres with a complex multicul­tural sensibility, at times reinventing them in the context of Mexican history and legends. But while she can draw knowledgeably on classic texts like the Mayan Popol Vuh or paint convinc­ing portraits of Mexican culture and politics in 19th-century Yucatan or Mexico City of the 1920s or 1970s, she’s equally knowledgeable about genre, as evidenced by that allusion to the Wells novel, by her well-known familiarity with Lovecraft (in her editorial work as well as her fic­tion), and now by the epigraph to her new novel Silver Nitrate, from one of M.R. James’s classic ghost stories, ‘‘Casting the Runes’’ (runes turn out to be an important plot point in the novel). That intriguing title, by the way, shares an inter­esting conceit with Moreno-Garcia’s first novel, Signal to Noise: the notion that certain kinds of what we might call legacy media – vinyl records in the case of Signal to Noise, the famously combustible old-fashioned nitrate film stock in the present novel – can serve just as effectively as talismans of the supernatural as any of the ancient books or stones or creepy portraits of classic horror fiction. (It’s not unique to Moreno-Garcia, as any number of cursed videotapes or haunted cameras attest, but she makes much more intelligent thematic use of it than most.)

Montserrat Curiel is a skilled sound editor who finds it increasingly difficult to get assignments in the male-dominated film industry of Mexico City in the 1990s. Her lifelong best friend Tristan is a fading soap-opera actor haunted by the accidental death of his girlfriend a decade earlier, for which he feels partly responsible. When Tristan moves into a new apartment, he discovers his neighbor is Abel Urueta, an almost forgotten director of a series of horror films in the 1950s, whose work is admired by both Tristan and Montserrat. Over a dinner which involves a lot of geeking out over classic horror directors like Tod Browning and Jacques Tourneur, Urueta tells them about a Nazi-connected German occultist named Wilhelm Ewers, who worked on the screenplay of Urueta’s last unfinished film, and who, influenced by the likes of Aleister Crowley and Anton LaVey, came to believe that movies could be used to amplify the casting of spells. Silver nitrate film stock, already being phased out in the 1950s because of its flam­mability, was especially effective ‘‘because silver is a powerful conduit for spells.’’ When a local cinematheque shows interest in a retrospective of Urueta’s work – including showing a print of that unfinished film – the three of them are drawn into an increasingly ominous web involving a silent film star who hardly seems to age, the ghost of Tristan’s girlfriend, a mysterious screenwriter with a dual identity, an apparently haunted abandoned publishing house, and the frightening prospect of somehow resurrecting Ewers himself.

Moreno-Garcia is a master of pacing, gradually ramping up the supernatural stakes while pepper­ing the tale with fascinating bits of occult esoterica ranging from Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (which gave rise to vril societies, based on his notion of a kind of immortality elixir) to Jack Par­sons, the rocket engineer connected to everyone from Crowley to L. Ron Hubbard. But the novel rests mainly on a few sharply drawn characters: Montserrat, a skilled professional coping with the endemic sexism of the 1990s film industry as well as her lifelong crush on her best friend; Tristan, whose commitment to Montserrat lends him a kind of stability in the face of a largely failed acting career; and Urueta, a talented has-been director whose need to be remembered ranges from the craven to the arrogant. Some of the secondary characters, like Montserrat’s sister Areceli, don’t really have much to do, despite a subplot involv­ing her cancer treatments, while others, like that silent film actress, seem to know exactly how to hit their marks in a Gothic melodrama. None quite fall into stereotypes, though, and Moreno-Garcia’s affection for a nearly forgotten corner of film his­tory, as well as her almost gleeful appreciation of occult arcana, are undeniable fun, as are her two engrossing main leads.

This review and more like it in the June 2023 issue of Locus.

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