A Ghost Story: Silver Nitrate

Silvia Moreno-Garcia really knows how to write scary stories!
I did a detailed review of her novel Mexican Gothic here.

Lots of good stuff in this ghost-filled tale! Moreno-Garcia knows how to build suspense and horror, and how to embed the scary stuff in everyday concerns. The plot of Silver Nitrate is complicated and wonderfully worked out, involving a number of interesting characters with a variety of occult skills, all set in Mexico City in 1993.

The two main characters in Silver Nitrate -- Tristán and Montserrat -- are slowly swept into a ghost-hunting frenzy, as they try to lift a curse on a lost movie that was being filmed years earlier in a movie studio in Mexico City. The film had used silver nitrate film, an obsolete and dangerous medium. This explosive substance also, they discover, made a perfect vehicle for creating an elaborate portal to the world of evil spirits and occult intentions, as used by an adept and unscrupulous sorcerer and his followers. (But that's enough spoilers!)

Despite the pressures and the dangers Tristán and Montserrat face, they always manage to stop to eat and sleep and regain their strength. These mundane interruptions are very effective at prolonging the suspense that the author is building. For example, just after a grizzly murder, these two are walking along a street:

"The first week of December. It was the season to devour empanadas, eat rosca de reyes, and listen to the fireworks exploding late at night. He was hoping to drink all the way through the posadas—he’d work off the calories in January. It was not the month to be chasing after murderers."  (p. 156).

On a morning after the two of them encounter some very frightening things:

"Tristán plated the eggs. He’d found corn tortillas in the refrigerator, but he clung to his northern customs and preferred flour ones, so he warmed one for Montserrat but none for himself. They took the plates and the glasses filled with orange juice to the table. They ate quietly. The silence strained the ears." (p. 229).  

Or dining at the home of an elderly man who knows how to perform anti-ghost rituals they need to use, and who knows how to stop the attacks of the more and more threatening supernatural creatures in the story:

"The supper consisted of a watery chicken soup that had Tristán yearning for his mother’s lentil soup with chard and the comforts of his apartment." (p. 251).

Also fascinating: Nazi racism and theories of pure blood play a role in the motivation of the sorcerer's creation, and continue to affect the evil ghosts and evil survivors of the curse in Silver Nitrate. In her earlier novel, Mexican Gothic,  Moreno-Garcia similarly created supernatural monsters who looked like white men, and were driven by extreme views on the superiority of the white race and the inferiority of "the other." This is a convention I very much enjoy. As the New York Times reviewer expressed it: "Moreno-Garcia lays bare the compatibility of Nazi ideology with regional ideas of racial supremacy, discrimination against Indigenous groups and desires to mejorar la raza — 'better the race.'”

Note: The ghosts are real! The rivers of blood are real! The temptation to follow a ghost into the night is real! This is a genuine horror novel.

A Parallel Demonstration of Racism in Mexico

A demonstrably fake mummy displayed this week to the Mexican Congress, which is holding hearings 
on extraterrestrial life. DNA shows that this fake is made up of bones from several human and animal remains.

The history of this fake mummy, displayed to the Mexican Congress, is a long one. The participation of a number of fraudsters with faked credentials and lucrative social media campaign to support their "research" is depressingly predictable. In an article in Vox, “The true story of the fake unboxed aliens is wilder than actual aliens: All the greed, fraud, centuries of racism, and deteriorated llama skulls behind Mexico’s unboxed aliens.” author Aja Romano documents the fraud and the role of racism in enabling the fraudsters. I was very interested because it’s the same racist motivation that features in the novel Silver Nitrate.

Romano writes: “even beyond the travesty that is disturbing individual disinterred remains lie the centuries of societal attempts to diminish the glory of pre-Columbian artists and architects and turn their works into inconceivable ancient alien wonders.”

Interesting parallels thus seem to exixt between these various examples of sheer racism in South America and Mexico.

Review © 2023 mae sander.