Silver Nitrate

I received a digital advance reader’s copy of Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia via NetGalley. Silver Nitrate is scheduled for release on July 18, 2023.

Silver Nitrate takes place in the 1990s in Mexico City. We follow Montserrat, a sound editor fighting for his place in the boy’s club that is the film industry. She is also intermittently fighting for the attention of her best friend, Tristan, a fading soap opera star who forgets about her during peaks of his love life. Tristan discovers that his upstairs neighbor is cult horror film director, and pulls Montserrat into the director’s work with silver nitrate film stock. The director believes that when the stock is combined with the correct words in audio, magic can happen.

Like most of Moreno-Garcia’s books, the strength of this novel is the atmosphere and tone. Reading this novel felt like watching an aged cult horror film. The plot followed this as well, giving us a story that I can imagine playing as a cult classic. Moreno-Garcia does flip the characters a bit from the expected, with Montserrat driving the story forward, and rescuing the “swains in distress.”

I would have like to learn more about these characters and their relationship with each other. We do get pieces of Montserrat’s and Tristan’s separate backstories, and some bits of their past together, but overall, I was missing something in their relationship. In the end, there is a change in their relationship that did not quite make sense to me based on what we had seen of their past and the events of this story.

Overall, Silver Nitrate is a film horror cult classic in book form. As always, Moreno-Garcia has created a specific experience for her readers, though I would have liked a bit more exploration of the relationships.