Told in the dual perspectives of Montserrat Curiel and Tristán Abascal, 38-year-old horror enthusiasts and lifelong friends, Silver Nitrate tests the bonds of this central friendship as they are embroiled in a twisted and terrifying mystery linked to a cursed film. In the fall of 1993, Montserrat, a petite sound editor who’d had a limp as a child and grew into an adult with an unadorned style and brusque manner, barely gets by on the ever dwindling shifts she’s allotted at the male-dominated post-production company Antares. Even after seven years of proving herself, she’s still fighting for respect and living paycheck to paycheck. Perpetually stressed about her precarious finances, the sexist office politics at her job, and concerns over her sister Araceli’s poor health, her only respite is the three things she loves most: horror movies, her car, and Tristán. 

However, Tristán is often as infuriating and self-absorbed as he is endearing and steadfast. She’d loved him unrequitedly for years when they were younger; now she tolerates his faults because of their shared history and her deep affection for him. While Montserrat struggles working off-screen in the entertainment industry, Tristán has a difficult time booking acting roles in front of the camera. Tall, charismatic, and handsome, he was once an in-demand telenovela star and one half of an acting power couple with his co-star and girlfriend Karina. Tragically, a car accident killed Karina and left his face badly scarred, forever changing the course of their lives and the trajectory of his career. In the years since the accident, Tristán has battled grief and addiction, bounced between different apartments and relationships, and taken voice acting roles where he could get them. 

When Montserrat helps Tristán settle into his latest apartment, they’re both a bit down on their luck. They find a kindred spirit in Abel Urueta, an aging and lonely director of some of the classic horror films they admire, who serendipitously lives in the same building as Tristán. The pair befriend Abel and he regales them with stories from his past, of Mexico’s film industry in the ‘50s and ‘60s. He shares the story of one film production in particular, Beyond the Yellow Door, a 1961 horror flick captured on obsolete and volatile silver nitrate film stock, that was beset by problems and ultimately never completed. Abel had collaborated on the film with screenwriter Romeo Donderis; fledgling actress Clarimonde Bauer, his fiancé and the daughter of a publisher; the film’s financier, former screen siren Alma Montero; and Wilhelm Ewers, a magnetic, opportunistic, German scribe whose obsessions with the magic of cinema and the occult had distinctly racist underpinnings. Before the film could be finished, Ewers was killed in a mugging and shortly thereafter, Alma pulled her funding and destroyed the film’s reels. Abel laments that Beyond the Yellow Door was the film that ended his career and seemed to trigger bad luck, from obstacles obtaining new roles to numerous accidents and deaths, for practically everyone involved in its making.  

Montserrat gets the idea to earn an alternate source of income by interviewing Abel for Enigma, a TV show that deals with paranormal phenomena. Abel initially declines Montserrat’s proposal, not wanting his work and personal life to be associated with the kind of sensational programming that Enigma trades in. Though he later reconsiders, with a proviso: Montserrat and Tristán help him finish dubbing the audio for the one reel of Beyond the Yellow Door that he managed to salvage. He hopes that in doing this, he can reverse some of his bad luck.

Tristán is eager to help his hero and Montserrat is inclined to comply as well, except something about the whole thing gives her pause. Nonetheless, they join Abel in reciting lines Ewers had written before his death and Montserrat mixes the audio. At first, their collective fortunes do indeed seem to improve, with Abel being contacted for a retrospective of his work, Tristán landing the lead role on a series, and Montserrat receiving news that Araceli’s cancer is in remission. Then, a bloodied Karina begins appearing to Tristán in ghastly and hyperreal visions, Abel has a startling premonition, and Montserrat is followed by a shadowy figure. By resuming production on the film decades later, they’d inadvertently unlocked nefarious forces and set dire consequences in motion. 

Gripping from the first page, Silver Nitrate delivers chills and thrills while paying homage to classic cinema and its craft. Montserrat and Tristán make a compelling odd coupling with a lived-in, interdependent dynamic that helps fuel the narrative’s dramatic tension. Silvia Moreno-Garcia deftly picks up the sociological interrogation of racial hierarchies she began in Mexican Gothic, here expanding her lens beyond the family to magnify national mythologies and ideologies. She examines storytelling as both a tool that brings comfort and unites, as it did for Montserrat and Tristán as children, and a means of power which the novel’s antagonists deviously weaponize. Silver Nitrate is an entrancing and evocative read. 

LOGLINE: In 1990s Mexico City, childhood friends Montserrat and Tristán, a struggling audio editor and a former telenovela star, respectively, unwittingly unleash a decades-old curse when they agree to help a classic horror director with his unfinished film. 

MOOD: A riveting, slow-burning work of suspense and horror that’s equal parts paranormal puzzle box and cinematic and historical deep-dive.

TITLE: Silver Nitrate

AUTHOR: Silvia Moreno-Garcia

GENRE: Horror, Suspense, Thriller, Cinema History, Paranormal Fiction

PUBLISHER: Del Rey, an imprint of Penguin Random House

PUB DATE: 18 July 2023

LENGTH: 336 pages