Silver Nitrate
Silvia Moreno-Garcia“No one punctures the skin of reality to reveal the lurking, sinister magic beneath better than Silvia Moreno-Garcia.”— Kiersten White, #1 bestselling author of Hide
ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF THE SUMMER: The New York Times, NPR, Chicago Tribune, Paste, Lit Hub, CrimeReads
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, & 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...“In this summer’s treat, Silver Nitrate, Moreno-Garcia again deploys horror as a touchstone for a textured ghost story with surprising historical undertones while paying homage to a lesser-known progenitor of the form. True to her method, she succeeds here by knowing when to follow the rules of genre storytelling & when to turn them upside down...
Several times in Silver Nitrate, a spirit commands, “Follow me into the night.” While the better part of us hopes Montserrat & her compatriots will refuse, there is simply no resisting the dark spells cast by Moreno-Garcia’s characters — nor those so expertly cast over readers by the author herself.” — Los Angeles Times