Montserrat is a sound editor at a second-rate Mexican film studio, struggling to stay in the good graces of her sexist boss and living life mostly on her own. Aside from her cancer-stricken sister, her only real company is her childhood friend Tristan, a former soap opera star now resorting to voice-over work to make ends meet. The relationship between the two friends has a lived-in, comfortable feel, though Montserrat’s long-standing crush on Tristan is an unacknowledged open secret between the pair. They’re the kind of friends who know each other too well and thus have too much dirt on each other. Montserrat resents being Tristan’s emotional support person after yet another breakup, while Tristan thinks her prickly personality is just a cover to get away with saying cruel things.
Montserrat has harbored a lifelong obsession with horror movies, the more obscure the better, so when Tristan’s new neighbor turns out to be a long-retired horror-movie maker she leaps at the chance to meet him. Montserrat desperately wants to ask him about his final film, a horror production that went disastrously awry and has never been seen. After some dinner table pleasantries, the director drops a bombshell on Montserrat: not only does he have a copy of the film, he wants her and Tristan’s help in finishing it.
But Montserrat and Tristan don’t really know what they are signing up. The film turns out to have been a specialty project, funded by an aging film actress and her protege, a German emigre obsessed with the occult. The two of them roped the director and screenwriter into their scheme, and the film print might just contain some supernatural evil within it.
It’s a legitimately great setup for a horror novel, but unfortunately Moreno-Garcia doesn’t really deliver on it. The pacing is very off for a horror novel, with scares few and far between. Far too much time is devoted to Montserrat’s lackluster cooking skills and Tristan’s insecurity about how his looks are holding up as he ages. While obviously meant to develop the characters, these beats are repeated so often they really get in the way. Even worse, the horror elements of the story are really rather tame and basic, there’s nothing to stir the imagination, let alone frighten it.
Moreno-Garcia tries to make something out of Montserrat’s obsessive tendencies making her a juicy target for the occultists surrounding the long-lost film, but the writing just isn’t strong enough to sustain the reader’s interest through to the story’s obvious, inevitable conclusion.