And we’re off! As usual, we sprinkle through October a selection of books that are more suited to Halloween. In this first post we welcome back our Curator of the Cadavers, Randy Money, who has his eye on a book that combines moviemaking with something more sinister…
The kids in the neighborhood would dare one another to jump into the gigantic piles of grain. They traded gruesome descriptions of rodents hiding in the corn, waiting to gnaw children’s toes off. They whispered stories of people who had choked to death, suffocated by the grain. ….
Tristán wouldn’t jump alone. Montserrat remembered plummeting into the gigantic piles of grain, Tristán’s hand firmly grasping her own. …
From chapter 3
“Lopéz says the living hold on to ghosts. You made a haunted house out of your own flesh and bones.”
“How poetic,” [Tristán] muttered, sitting down again.
From chapter 23
Montserrat, a sound editor, and Tristán, an infrequent actor, have been friends since childhood, from the moment when Tristan was cornered by bullies and Montserrat, fierce and indomitable, fended them off with her cane, big boys cowed by a small girl with a bad leg. That dynamic has lasted into their late 30s, when each is still the other’s closest friend.
Part of their continuing friendship rests in a shared love of movies, having spent hours of their childhood watching old movies together, in particular horror movies, on TV or VHS tapes or, as they grew older, in revival theaters in 1990s Mexico City. But Tristán was a casual viewer who turned away from the more violent and gory scenes at Montserrat’s warning, while Montserrat was fully invested and even now her apartment is littered with posters and memorabilia of those horror movies.
Moving into a new apartment puts Tristán in the orbit of once famous Mexican movie director, Abel Urueta. A favorite of Montserrat’s, she and Tristán have seen Urueta’s two well-known early 1960s horror movies, and wonder about his unfinished film, Beyond the Yellow Door. Listening to Urueta fascinates Montserrat and now Abel wants them to help him finish dubbing the film. Beyond the Yellow Door was largely inspired by Wilhelm Ewers, a charismatic man and self-proclaimed sorcerer, who believed in film as the perfect medium for his spells. Urueta believes the bad luck that haunted his later career can be undone by completing the film.
But silver nitrate film, known for the sharpness of its black and white images, is also highly combustible. And so are aging, dormant spells.
Presented rather like a feature movie – first section, “Opening Title Sequence MCMXCIII”; second section, “Feature Film”; third section, “Fade to Black” — Moreno-Garcia displays admirable concision, introducing her characters, their preoccupations and backstory quickly and efficiently. Within 315 pages we get two damaged people, friends for life, a once promising director of horror films, a fabled star of silent pictures, an aging socialite with an interest in Ewers, a Nazi sympathizing sorcerer, a cult, a hermit who was once a screenwriter, and a film that may be cursed or may contain a spell that was never finished, and what that entails and what that spell might do. Add to that a copious amount of information about film, and specifically Mexican films, and a magic system Moreno-Garcia neatly details without turning it into a science.
The characters are well-realized, as are those portions of Mexico City that the characters inhabit and visit: H.P. Lovecraft had Arkham, Stephen King has Derry, and Moreno-Garcia is doing a fine job with Mexico City. Further, as with Gemma Files’ Experimental Film and Ramsey Campbell’s The Grin of the Dark, film and its history infuses the story, the author’s love and knowledge of movies so intertwined with the plot and the magic system Moreno-Garcia develops that it would be impossible to separate them without unraveling the entire novel.
And, I suppose, I should add a trigger warning for the sensitive: There is a romance.
I know! I know! Horror of horrors, a writer dares sully a scary story with human emotion! Tsk, tsk!
But it is a book about the movies, and movies tend to resolve all the tensions they portray.
SILVER NITRATE by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (2023; Del Rey)
Review by Randy Money
