The manual of magic that Montserrat reads is evocative of “modern” esoteric mysticism (e.g. The story explicitly discusses the lineage of late 19 th Century and early 20 th Century esoteric mysticism, from Helena Blavatsky through Aliester Crowley, and its pathway to Nazism. Patrick Rothfuss’ true names in THE NAME OF THE WIND) debate. Brandon Sanderson in MISTBORN) vs “numinous” (e.g. And, just as silver nitrate film is volatile by nature occasionally burning what it recorded away to ash, so too are the characters’ pasts volatile and subject to a conflagration that forces them to process what came before and what looms ahead.Īlso, the magic “system” that is explored is almost self-referential, as though the work knowingly satirizes the SFF community’s interest in both the “hard” (e.g. Everyone, to some extent, is viewing their past as if it were recorded on silver nitrate film, and refusing to allow it to be something that is gone, unattainable, unchangeable. Other characters refuse to accept their youthful years are behind them, or their time as powerful mystics is past. Urueta is haunted by the failure of his directorial career. In fact, it’s noted that the images recorded on silver nitrate film are crisper, the blacks richer, the experience more immersive than modern film. The title of the book, SILVER NITRATE, is taken from a particular type of film that was phased out of use due to its propensity to catch fire. The story is constantly one of looking back at a past that is gone but that the characters cannot or will not acknowledge is gone. There’s several lenses to view this work through.

Dark magic that their investigations might just reawaken. In the course of asking about that lost film, Montserrat and Tristán discover its history involves cults, Nazis, and dark magic. One of Urueta’s films was never released, and stories of it became urban legends. Montserrat, a punky, horror movie enthusiast, and sound engineer and her former soap opera star friend, Tristán, meet the retired director of cult horror movies, Abel Urueta. Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s SILVER NITRATE is a slow-burning story about film history and the corruption lurking behind the glitz and glam of the entertainment industry, of cults and cultic syncretism, of magic and desire and the human impulse to cling to a destructive past rather than to grow toward a possible future.

Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia