Silver Nitrate

Hardcover, 336 pages

Published July 18, 2023 by Del Rey.

ISBN:
978-0-593-35536-7
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4 stars (2 reviews)

Montserrat has always been overlooked. She’s a talented sound editor, but she’s left out of the boys’ club running the film industry in ’90s Mexico City. And she’s all but invisible to her best friend, Tristán, a charming if faded soap opera star, though she’s been in love with him since childhood.

Then Tristán discovers his new neighbor is the cult horror director Abel Urueta, and the legendary auteur claims he can change their lives—even if his tale of a Nazi occultist imbuing magic into highly volatile silver nitrate stock sounds like sheer fantasy. The magic film was never finished, which is why, Urueta swears, his career vanished overnight. He is cursed.

Now the director wants Montserrat and Tristán to help him shoot the missing scene and lift the curse . . . but Montserrat soon notices a dark presence following her, and Tristán begins seeing the ghost of his …

6 editions

Slow with little plot

3 stars

I want to like Moreno-Garcia’s novels so badly. I really want to. I think she is a good writer overall; where she fails, every time, is in the plotting and pacing of her work. This work is no exception. The general plot, which is somewhat similar to Gemma Files’ Experimental Film, is not uninteresting. But the pace of the story is so sloooooooooow. Literally hundreds of pages go by in which nothing really happens. This would have made an interesting novella, perhaps—but there just isn’t enough story for a 300+ page novel.

The characters themselves are truly awful—not just unlikeable antiheroes, but insufferable, obnoxious representations of people. Why should we care if they succeed? Why should we want them to win? You got me, dear reader, you got me.

And that’s pretty much it. Each novel by Moreno-Garcia just leaves me feeling disappointed, saddened by the wasted potential. Maybe …