mood music: Luzbel – pasaporte al infierno
Reminiscent of Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno Garcia returns to her Lovecraftian roots with Silver Nitrate. Set in Mexico during the early 1990s, the reader follows Montserrat (Momo), an audio engineer, and Tristan, a washed-up telenovela actor, whose chance encounter with a golden-era director leads them down a path of occultism and nazi worship.
Shortly after moving into his apartment, Tristan meets his new neighbor, cult horror director Abel Urueta, after accidentally receiving his mail and delivering it to him. He is familiar with Urureta’s work as he has watched several of his films with Momo, as she is a film aficionado and horror movie lover. Urueta invites Tristan and Momo over to his place for dinner, divulging the events leading up to his last film and the end of his career. Urueta explains that he became involved with a Nazi occultist, a man named Wilhelm Ewers who believed that the real Atlanteans and every thought leader from ancient history, dating back to the time of the Aztec Empire, was Aryan. Ewers taught Urueta how to channel dark magic through his book, The House of Infinite Wisdom. In return, Urueta worked together with Ewers to direct his final project, a film called Beyond the Yellow Door. Although the movie was partially completed, it was never finished and what was filmed was destroyed by the financer. Urueta believes this is what led to the end of his directing career.
Now that he has befriended Momo and Tristan, Urueta comes up with an idea – he was able to salvage some of the film before the financer could destroy it. He wants to dub the scenes over with Momo and Tristan, as the film has no audio, it’s just moving pictures. They agree, and the three work together to complete the scene and give Urueta a much-needed win. Little do they know, dubbing over this scene that has opened a pandora’s box of issues, as Ewers has enmeshed his dark magic with the silver nitrate of the film reel. The trio has unknowingly unleashed a curse that was dormant for the last 30 years, waiting to be released.
I really enjoyed this book, I think it’s Moreno-Garcia’s best work since Mexican Gothic. She can weave together such wonderful imagery with her words, I could picture myself in the setting of 1990’s Mexico City and how these characters were dealing with their day-to-day as they try to navigate this newfound power. The horror elements and magical realism that I loved in Mexican Gothic were all present in this book, I really enjoyed this return to the weird and moody plots she is so good at crafting.