In ‘Silver Nitrate,’ a cursed film propels 2 childhood friends to the edges of reality
Silvia Moreno-Garcia is best known, and rightly so, for her wildly popular and deeply sumptuous horror novel from 2020, Mexican Gothic — a tale that draws, like much of her work, from her Mexican heritage.
But when it comes to her latest book, Silver Nitrate, it might be better to look back at the bestselling author’s lesser known, but no less engrossing, debut novel, the 2015 fantasy Signal to Noise, which focused on the magical qualities trapped in the grooves of vinyl records.
Her latest novel likewise plumbs the mystery of an obsolete physical format popularized in the early 1900s: silver nitrate, the chemical basis of film stock that was phased out in the 1950s due to its volatility. Unlike vinyl records, which can last forever if cared for properly, silver nitrate film stock is combustible: The substance was actually used to make explosives at the same time moviemakers relied on it to help film their classics during the golden age of cinema.
Moreno-Garcia’s fascination with the otherworldly potential of vintage physical media took the form of outright spellcasting in Signal to Noise. But in Silver Nitrate, there’s something more subtle being woven.
Moreno-Garcia’s fascination with the otherworldly potential of vintage physical media took the form of outright spellcasting in Signal to Noise. But in Silver Nitrate, there’s something more subtle being woven.
Protagonists Tristán and Montserrat happen upon the elderly Urueta, and their fascination with the film’s mystique propels them into the most eldritch edges of reality, where the phrase “movie magic” takes on a whole new meaning.
Before becoming a successful novelist, Moreno-Garcia made her mark as one of the foremost experts on the work of weird-fiction pioneer H. P. Lovecraft — as well as more obscure contemporaries such as Robert W. Chambers, upon whose work Lovecraft expanded.
Unsurprisingly, she steeps Silver Nitrate in this well of eerie myth. Most visibly, the title of Urueta’s Behind the Yellow Wall comes across as a wink-nudge mashup of Lovecraft’s 1919 story “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” and Chambers’ 1895 book The King in Yellow. Lovecraft incorporated Chambers’ cosmic horror into his own, and Moreno-Garcia absorbs their tradition and spins it into a far more colorful and progressive form, one that hopefully makes the notoriously racist Lovecraft turn in his grave.
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