Silver Nitrate

The Spell
Tale Heart

Silver Nitrate
by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Jo Fletcher Books
ISBN: 9781529418040

Silver Nitrate is the latest book by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Now I’d vaguely seen her name connected with a couple of books which floated through my timeline on Twitter, mainly Mexican Gothic and The Daughter Of Dr. Moreau but, it wasn’t until I caught a review of this book by RunAlongWomble in my follow lists that I realised that this was a book which should be right up my alley. And, thankfully, I was totally right to take a chance on someone who, for me, is a ‘new author’ because, yeah, it’s a truly wonderful novel.

The book starts off with a humdinger of an opening quote, from M. R. James’ famous story Casting The Runes, about being cautious how you should manipulate or emulate a cursed media. Now, of course, the character who is the ‘villain’ of that story was slightly based on the real life Aleister Crowley and, while this novel certainly name checks the famous occult figure, a certain character in this book has a slightly different origin in his point of reference (the author cites some of her influences in an afterword).

But let me set the scene for you. Set in three sections... Opening Title Sequence MCMXCIII, Feature Film and Fade To Black, the book, set in 1993 (aka MCMXCIII), deals with a couple of central protagonists. One is a sound editor for hire, Monserrat, who is trapped in a dead end job at the production offices she works in and who is a huge fan of horror movies. And then there’s her lifelong friend Tristran, who is a former, incredibly successful soap opera star who has had a run of bad luck and who currently does voice work at the same production company, living on the embers of his former celebrity. The two have a long history and are inseparable companions but, are also highly critical of each other’s lifestyles... the writer capturing the characters and giving them wonderful collisions of dialogue as she makes them credible people right off the bat.

Then, one day, Tristran moves into an apartment block downstairs from a famous Mexican director, who had a run of good horror movies in the 1950s, along with a rumoured ‘lost film’ which was never completed. Due to Monserrat’s love of Mexican horror, she gets pulled into a three way friendship with the director who reveals that he has a scene still from the cursed, ‘destroyed in mysterious circumstances’, lost film... the part which was intended, through the medium of the silver nitrate stock (silver being a good carrier for magic), to give birth to a powerful spell when shown in cinemas. He proposes that, due to Monserrat’s skills and access to editing and dubbing equipment, the three of them finish the sound to recreate the spell, so they can reverse a curse which has been associated with the film. Before long, though, Monserrat and Tristran find themselves embroiled in a sinister world of black magic cults, murders, magical death traps and counter spells... not to mention human sacrifice and unlikely allies.

And, yeah, it’s a great read. Monserrat especially is a great creation and the writer has imbued her character with a knowledge for all things horror and especially alludes to certain key points in Mexican horror and exploitation cinema along the way (causing me to once more unfold my poor wallet to get what I can in terms of Blu Ray releases I might have otherwise left alone... yeah, thanks lady).

I noticed, in the first section of chapters especially, that the writer has a shifting viewpoint of third person narrative, which focuses on each of the two main protagonists in turn... although this method of delivery, while still holding true, seems to relax a little in its distribution as the book continues. So that’s kinda interesting.

And there are some great shout outs for horror fans, as I said. For instance, Monserrat owns a lot of bootleg horror stuff and lives in an apartment featuring posters of Suspiria and Hasta El Viento Miedo. And, though I’ve never seen the remake of The Blob myself (don’t worry, it’s on my ‘to acquire’  list), it’s obviously Monserrat’s preferred version of that particular gelatinous threat. Also, there’s a lovely moment where she off handedly mentions that she once knew a person who wanted to trade her his pages photocopied from the ‘real’ Necronomicon for her VHS copy of Lucio Fulci’s Zombie, so yeah, there’s a lot of humour in the book too.

By the time of the final reel, so to speak, the book ramps up full tilt on spellcasting and magic battles but, because of the way the writer has grounded her central characters in the earlier parts of the narrative, there’s not too much suspension of disbelief required in the more fantastical... and somewhat deadly... parts of the novel. Which I appreciated... it takes its time and, well, the build up is pretty good foreplay as far as I’m concerned.

And that’s me done with Silver Nitrate, a book that I thoroughly enjoyed from cover to cover and something I’d already recommended to a few people before I’d even finished it. And now, sometime next year I suspect, I will have to start looking and reading through this lady’s back catalogue of novels to see what else she’s done. I’ll let you know as soon as I can.