Category: Books

Book
My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Volume One by Emil Ferris

Synopsis
This is the spiral-bound notebook of Karen Reyes, a 10-year-old living in a basement apartment in Chicago with her mother and older brother. She loves monster movies and horror comics, and she wishes that she’ll be bitten by an undead creature to transform her into the werewolf girl that she knows she truly is. When her troubled upstairs neighbor is killed by a gunshot, she puts on her brother’s trenchcoat and hat and becomes a noir detective on a mission to solve the case.

Notes
For years I’ve been hearing this book described as “astonishing,” “dazzling,” “beautiful,” and “profound.” All the superlatives are accurate. It’s absolutely stunning in how it combines images and words in ways that can only exist in a graphic novel, to the degree that neither seems to be a complement for the other; they inextricably linked with each other.

It also tackles some of the heaviest of heavy topics — the Holocaust, racism, homophobia, cruelty, isolation, poverty, murder, grief, guilt — in a way that doesn’t rob them of their weight and impact, but also aren’t too heavy that you want to look away or become overwhelmed. It’s all processed through the mind of a girl who’s extremely intelligent, but has a specific frame of reference (or lack thereof) for everything, so there’s a sense of fascination to it all.

And the art is stunning throughout. Karen copies the covers of her favorite horror comics (they form the chapter breaks), and she loves going to the Art Institute with her older brother and copying some of her favorite paintings. She has synesthesia, and many of the paintings have smells that trigger strong memories for her. Her drawings are mostly done in pencil with cross-hatched shading, often with colored pencil, and sometimes in ink when she’s recounting particularly traumatic events.

Volume One ends on something of a cliffhanger, and Volume Two was just released last year after a seven year delay. I’m eager to see how the story ends, but I think it’ll be a while before I tackle it. As amazing as My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is, it’s felt like a dark cloud of sadness hanging over everything.

Verdict
Undeniably a masterpiece, a look at the dark cruelty of the world and the bright moments of kindness, all interpreted by an unusually imaginative child.

Book
The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher

Synopsis
Melissa, nicknamed “Mouse,” has been asked by her father to help clean out the home of her recently-deceased grandmother. She travels alone with her dog to the house, deep in the woods of North Carolina, and discovers that in addition to being cruel and abusive, the woman had been a hoarder. As she’s sorting through years’ worth of collected trash, she discovers a hidden diary written by her grandmother’s second husband. It contains an unsettling description of a Green Book that has been hidden somewhere in the house, his encounters with strange creatures in the woods, and a repeated litany that includes the line I twisted myself like the twisted ones. She starts searching for the Green Book that might help explain the man’s descent into madness, and she begins to realize that there is something outside the house at night, trying to get inside.

Notes
This is the first book I’ve read by T. Kingfisher, and I’m still not sure what to make of it. I definitely enjoyed it, but it wasn’t at all what I’d expected.

In particular, the tone was so lighthearted that it often felt like it was somehow a parody of itself. Mouse is frequently making wisecracks and half-serious observations about the things that are going on, while the things that are going on are all straight out of a folk horror story. And a genuinely creepy one at that.

It almost seems like it’d be easier to process if it had been so flippant that it was no longer scary. But there are descriptions of being alone in the house at night, with rooms left unexplored, and with strange things outside, that are extremely effective. Especially if you’re reading it in bed in the dark.

At the same time, there’s a cast of other characters who join Mouse to help her out, going past the role of comic relief and joining in the wisecracks. It almost feels like a self-imposed writing challenge, to put as many elements into the story as possible to completely deflate any sense of tension and isolation, but still somehow make it scary.

The afterword for the book explains that it was inspired by a letter by HP Lovecraft, which was commenting on a real 19th-century horror story called The White People. Some of the character names, plus the format of a partially-remembered account of a lost book, are taken from that story. The Twisted Ones is a really interesting, contemporary take on that format so common to turn-of-the-20th-century horror, where horrific events are described second- or third-hand from letters or journals, stories within stories within stories.

Verdict
It seems like the book simply shouldn’t work as well as it does. Using the tone of something like a Douglas Adams novel to tell a folk horror story feels like it should be a disaster, too flippant to be genuinely scary, and yet I found myself sufficiently creeped out at all the right moments.

Book
Dark Matter by Blake Crouch

Synopsis
Jason Dessen is a quantum physicist living in Chicago, teaching at a university, and happily married with a teenage son. A contentious encounter with an old friend and roommate leaves Jason wondering about how his life would’ve gone differently had he pursued his research instead of settling down with a family. That night, he’s kidnapped by a stranger, injected with a disorienting drug, and left for dead inside an abandoned warehouse. When he wakes up, he finds himself in a familiar but alien version of his own world, where he’d not only continued his research into quantum entanglement, but taken it to an extreme that he never would’ve thought possible.

Notes
Usually, I can appreciate an author’s talent at making a book propulsive and engaging, even if I’m not entirely won over by its depth. Getting the pacing right for a thriller is really difficult, and it should be respected! And I’m also warming up to the idea of authors taking big swings stylistically, choosing to forgo straightforward, naturalistic writing in favor of making the prose itself interesting. But Dark Matter didn’t entirely work for me.

A big part of it is the writing style, and since I haven’t read anything else by Crouch, I still don’t know whether it’s his style, or if it’s a specific affectation he uses in this book. But there’s a drastically overused tendency to write in sentence fragments.

A few words.

A period.

An adjective.

Another adjective.

And so on.

Separated by lengthy, exposition-heavy dialogue in which characters that all have mostly the same voice will give a layman’s explanation of quantum theory or the layout of Chicago. It is undeniably good for pacing, and I often found myself barreling through it, but it also never stops being distracting.

I can’t really fault the book for its content feeling overfamiliar, since it was written during the initial wave of similar projects, and I’m only reading it now after the ideas have been overused in popular culture.

Multiverses.

Alternate realities.

Sliding Doors.

Everything.

Everywhere.

All at Once.

I feel like I can fault it for taking too long to get to the point, however. The first two thirds of the book are going to feel familiar to anyone who’s ever read or seen a story about multiverses, and it seems to treat the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment as if it were still an idea unexplored in popular fiction.

But the last third has a twist/plot development that I genuinely hadn’t seen coming, and it’s by far the most interesting idea in the book. Unsettling in its implications, took the story in a whole new direction, turned the story from suspense thriller into horror, since I had no idea how the protagonist could possibly get out of the situation.

And that ties into my other main criticism of the book, which is that it’s so completely solipsistic, something it mentions in passing but still doesn’t seem to be aware of how off-putting it is. The protagonist is the most important character in the multiverse, and everyone else is an afterthought. I noticed this the most in its handling of its two women characters, who are both described with respect, but are put into roles where they have no real agency apart from supporting or driving the main character. One of them even mentions that she’s being treated as a prize to be won, which doesn’t patch over the problem but merely draws attention to it.

But in its defense, she (Daniela, Jason’s wife) is also the character who explains why their solution for the book’s unsolvable final conflict is a satisfying one, calling out the very specific choices that do make us unique in an infinite multiverse. I was just disappointed that so much of the book is about her, without actually giving her a more significant role to play.

Verdict
I wouldn’t be as critical of a book that I didn’t enjoy reading at all, and Dark Matter is compelling and engaging, with the last third exploring an idea that I hadn’t expected and I hadn’t seen before. If you read it as an entertaining suspense thriller, the kind designed to hit the New York Times bestseller list and written with the movie rights already in mind, it’s solid. But (at the risk of being too corny) if you look at it too closely, it all starts to collapse.

Book
20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill

Synopsis
A collection of short stories that includes “The Black Phone,” possibly his best-known story because of its movie adaptation.

Notes
Until now, the only piece of Joe Hill’s work that I’d read was his excellent Locke & Key comics with Gabriel Rodriguez. Or I should say, the only piece that I could remember reading, because several of the stories in 20th Century Ghosts seemed undeniably familiar, as if I’d read this collection or, more likely, the stories collected elsewhere.

As the introduction states, the title of the collection is more of a metaphor than a packing list: only two of the stories could really be called ghost stories (“20th Century Ghost” and “The Black Phone”), and many of them aren’t even horror. Instead, there’s a common theme of echoes from the 20th century and its pop culture, presumably many of the things that interest Hill personally: horror in all its various formats, baseball, movies, science fiction, super-heroes and -villains, and, frequently, dysfunctional families.

Locke & Key was brilliant, but it also weighed heavily on me. It always seemed to be straddling my line of comfort and propriety, spending most of its time on the side of fascinating fantasy horror, then unexpectedly hopping over into what seemed like unnecessary cruelty or delighting in its characters’ misery. Hill spends a lot of 20th Century Ghosts jumping back and forth over that line, with stories that are original, imaginative, and masterfully written; that sometimes feel cruel in their lurid descriptions of poverty, learning disabilities, or complete over-the-top contempt for fat people. It’s just odd to be reading a story that seems to be touching on universal ideas, and then suddenly encounter something so needlessly exclusionary.

So it was a brilliant choice to start the collection with “Best New Horror,” which I think is an outstanding (fictional) encapsulation of horror fiction not just as a genre but a fandom. I’d call it a “defense” of horror, but it’s written with the sense of confident assertion that it doesn’t need to be defended. He describes two lurid, boundary-pushing horror stories, but with a sense of detachment, so that it doesn’t give the sense of wallowing in the gruesome details, but giving just enough to leave a disturbing image in the reader’s mind. Then he acknowledges the ways that horror fans are seen as “off” or troubled by people who don’t share their love of the genre, and the ways that the fandom attracts so many tiresome and unimaginative people who do just want to wallow in the gruesome details, with no real sense of artistry. And then he ends with a description of why he loves the genre, why he’s eager to find the boundaries of taste and propriety, and why pushing, pulling, and dancing over them gives the exhilarating feeling of being alive.

Another standout story is “Pop Art,” one of the sweetest and most imaginative in the collection, suggesting a ton of metaphors but never allowing itself to be reduced to just one simple idea. I also liked “Bobby Conroy Comes Back from the Dead,” a lost-loves story set during the filming of Dawn of the Dead; “Last Breath,” a good old-fashioned creepy story that wouldn’t be at all out of place in a Ray Bradbury collection; and “The Cape,” which I like mostly for consistently refusing to do what I expected it to do next. One of the best concepts is “You Will Hear the Locust Sing,” a 50s sci-fi-inspired homage to Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” but I thought it failed in the execution, giving in too much to pointless contempt for its white trash characters.

Verdict
This collection is incontrovertible proof of Joe Hill’s considerable talent. Far from being “just” a horror writer, he confidently and masterfully switches between tone, setting, voice, time period, and genre; even in the stories that I don’t like very much, the writing is excellent. He has a particular gift for knowing exactly how to end a story: rarely allowing it to settle on just one idea, but stopping at just the right moment, to let you feel the full weight of what’s going to happen next.

Book
Bloom by Delilah S. Dawson

Synopsis
After a betrayal and break-up, Ro moves back to her home state of Georgia to start her dream job as an assistant professor of literature in Athens. One day while at a farmer’s market wishing for something magical to happen in her life, she meets the most beautiful woman she’s ever seen, selling cupcakes and hand-made soaps and candles from a stall. The two hit it off immediately, and Ro quickly becomes intrigued with the idea of finding everything that’s been missing from her relationships with men, and completely infatuated with someone who seems to be naturally good at everything.

Notes
At the risk of stating the obvious, lesbian romances don’t typically give me anything to work with. So I was surprised as anyone to find myself almost squealing in the first chapters of this book, as Dawson somehow perfectly captures the thrilling feeling of falling hard for someone.

It’s that electrified sense of being simultaneously hyper-self-aware and wary of going too far, but also emboldened by new opportunity. We hear every one of Ro’s thoughts as she goes through all of the stages of a new romance, looking for signs that the attraction is mutual, tamping down sparks of unwarranted jealousy, making sure she’s not falling into patterns of obsessive behavior but then again who’s to say what’s obsessive and what’s perfectly healthy?

I especially love how Ro’s inner monologue hones in on specific phrases and facial expressions in her short exchanges with Ash. It reminded me of when I’ve been crushing hard on someone, and I could leave the briefest, most mundane conversations fully convinced that we’d just engaged in the most sparkling banter.

And because there’s no attempt to hide the premise that this is a horror story, it reads simultaneously like charming romance and suspense thriller. The writing itself gives no hints and definitely no winks to the reader; it is thoroughly the story of a smart, modern woman trying to navigate her way through feelings she’s never felt before. We’re listening to Ro making perfectly understandable and even intelligent choices at the same time we’re looking for all the warning signs and red flags that she’s blissfully blind to. Everything she describes as quaint or charming seems like it could be turned into something ominous and terrifying. The feeling of excitement and danger that comes from first kisses and first sexual experiences is something the reader feels viscerally, because we’re just waiting for the other shoe to drop and things to turn horribly dark.

The book is short, but it’s not slight so much as mercifully succinct. It’s also surprisingly funny in places, and it’s enjoyable to read a character in a horror story actually being smart, even when she doesn’t always have her wits about her. And even though we spend the entirety of the novella inside Ro’s mind, the worst moments still maintain the distance of fiction, reminding the reader that this is intended to be a fun horror story.

For other squeamish readers: the gruesome stuff is implied more than fully described, and it never felt as torturous as the other books I’ve seen it compared to. Still, I advise sensitive readers to check for content warnings available online. I don’t want to give anything away here, because a lot of the excitement for me came from having no specific idea how dark the story was going to get.

Verdict
I loved it. It’s the horror-story premise of “don’t go into that door!” played out as a story of romantic infatuation that’s clever, smart, genuinely charming, and embarrassingly (but also delightfully) familiar.

Book
The Watchers by AM Shine

Synopsis
Artist Mina is driving through a desolate part of Connemara when her car breaks down, right on the edge of a dense, dark forest. She goes into the woods looking for help. After dark falls, she hears bloodcurdling shrieks from all around, and she finds a stranger urgently rushing her into the only safe place after dark: a plain concrete bunker with a huge glass wall, and a bright light that shines all night to let the unseen creatures of the forest watch the human residents.

Notes
This was another book that was a recommended read in folk horror. I’d say it does qualify as a modern take on folk horror, but I’m wary of saying too much more about it, for fear of ruining whatever it is that makes it work.

And I say “whatever it is” because I’m still not exactly sure how it works. I started the book and was immediately concerned that I was going to have to abandon it, because it was somehow both overwritten and underwritten. It was full of these almost-florid descriptions of things that somehow completely failed to evoke a solid image of anything. It felt as if it were mimicking the action-description-tangential memory rhythm of novels just because that’s what novels are supposed to do. But I thought that’s just the prologue, I’ll see what happens once it gets started.

Then I thought that I was only into chapter 2, but I already disliked the protagonist. The book establishes her as the type of person who takes out a sketchpad in public and stares intently at strangers while she draws them without their permission, and those people are just the worst. And then a few chapters later, I was thinking that the premise seemed kind of implausible, and there had to be a more straightforward way to get a solitary woman alone in a forest. And then I thought that I’m several chapters in, and I still can’t picture the main setting for the bulk of the book from its descriptions, and the only reason I’ve got a mental picture of it at all is from the trailer for the movie adaptation from last year. And then I thought I’m only a quarter of the way through this book, and I can already see the ending coming from a mile away. And then I thought that I was barely halfway through the book, and it seemed way too obvious so there must be something else going on. And then I realized that I’d read three quarters of the book and it was way past my bedtime and I should go to sleep. (And immediately picked it up again and finished it the second I got home).

It’s got this propulsive energy that doesn’t so much make up for my criticisms as it renders them completely irrelevant. I still can’t say I feel any sort of attachment to any of the characters in the slightest, and yet I was desperate to know what happened to them. Does it even make sense for me to complain about clunky passages when I was this compelled to keep reading?

Verdict
One of the damndest experiences I’ve ever had reading a book. My blurb would be “a folk horror suspense thriller in the post-Lost age.” I don’t even know if I’d recommend it, but my experience wasn’t so much reading it as consuming it whole, gristle and all.

Book
Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand

Synopsis
The surviving members of an early 1970s folk rock band speak to documentary filmmakers about the making of their second album, Wylding Hall. In varying accounts, they talk about the summer spent inside the centuries-old manor house, the unsettling things they encountered inside, their former lead singer’s obsession with the ancient woods around the grounds, and the unexplained appearance of a strange girl in the album’s cover photo.

Notes
This was part of a video of folk horror recommendations on the “Sinead Hanna Craic” channel on YouTube, and I was immediately sold on the concept alone. What if all the imagery surrounding albums like Houses of the Holy and Led Zeppelin IV (both of which are referenced briefly in Wylding Hall) wasn’t just inspired by the growing interest in folk and traditional music at the time, but by ancient spirits who’ve lived around forests and burial mounds for millennia, the original inspirations for those traditional poems and ballads?

The mood of Wylding Hall is set with an evocative cover and the clever inclusion of a Dramatis Personae page. The bulk is presented as if it were almost a transcript of interviews from a documentary, cutting between the various characters as they give their own accounts as the overall narrative drives forward through the summer months they spent making the album.

My hyper-critical side had a tiny bit of difficulty getting into the book, since the artificiality of the format seemed a little too evident, and the different characters’ unique voices didn’t feel sufficiently defined. But this melts away very quickly, and within 50 or so pages, it became a case of can’t-put-it-down, must-finish-before-I-sleep. And the decision ultimately works well and feels natural, since we’ve now been conditioned to think of musicians talking about past events in the Behind the Music format.

I haven’t read much (any?) folk horror before, so I didn’t know what to expect. The vibe here is definitely more unsettling than outright horrifying, since it starts its foreshadowing from the first page and repeats it with casual references afterwards, preparing you for something that’s not startling, but inevitable. Once it gets going, it does an excellent job of maintaining the mood.

Verdict
A great concept and a really enjoyable read. The sense of inexplicable creepiness and unknowable forces at work lingers after you’ve set the book down, and you’re primed to be on the lookout for things that simply shouldn’t be there.

Book
Enter a Murderer by Ngaio Marsh

Series
Second book in the Roderick Alleyn series of detective stories

Synopsis
Journalist Nigel Bathgate is attending a play in the West End that’s starring a casual friend of his, and he’s invited his new acquaintance Chief Inspector Alleyn to tag along. A climactic moment in the play has the star shooting another character at point-blank range, a character who was played by a detestable actor who’d somehow managed to threaten, blackmail, or antagonize every other member of the production. But tonight, the scene ends in tragedy, as someone has swapped the gun’s dummy bullets for the real thing!

Notes
I read Ngaio Marsh’s first murder mystery earlier this year, and while I thought it was fun and engaging, I felt like I could barely make sense of it. The characters all had a rapport that felt a lot more modern than I’m used to seeing in works from the 1930s, but the language was full of idioms and references I didn’t recognize, and even their behavior seemed alien.

Enter a Murderer feels like an author who’s more confident and self-assured in her characters’ charm — I’ve read it suggested that part of that was because Marsh was familiar with the workings of theater and felt most at home in that setting — but I had an even harder time making sense of what I was reading.

The characters are clever and endearingly sarcastic, making the dialogue feel snappy and sophisticated, until one of them makes a reference that was completely impenetrable to me. I felt like a reverse Captain America, having to end every few paragraphs saying, “I did not understand that reference.”

Which wouldn’t be too bad, if the language didn’t often extend into the descriptions of what was happening. There are long stretches where Marsh describes people moving through the backstage areas of theater, or even around areas of London, and it was absolutely impossible for me to form a mental image of any of it. Characters kept doing or saying things that seemed as if they were supposed to be loaded with significance, but nothing was sparking any kind of connection for me. When we finally got the resolution of the mystery, my reaction was simply, “Okay, sure.”

There was a short-lived sketch comedy show called The New Show, and one of its most memorable sketches was called “Floont Artney, Private Eye.” The gag of the sketch was that it was a standard detective story in every way, except that all of the characters had bizarre names. Marsh’s books feel a little like that to me, when a character has a name like “Arthur Surbonadier” and it’s treated with little comment. (It’s not even the character’s real name!)

Verdict
It’s pretty fun and engaging, in that I never hated reading it. But this is going to be my last attempt at reading Ngaio Marsh for a while. I’m used to having to read Agatha Christie’s mysteries while constantly translating back and forth between my time period and England of the 30s and 40s; reading Marsh’s mysteries, I feel as if I’m having to translate not just from the 1930s to the 2020s, but from English to some weird alien language, and back to English again.

Book
The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham

Synopsis
One September 26th, everyone in the prosaic village of Midwich in the English countryside simultaneously collapses, unconscious. While the area is inaccessible, aerial photography captures an image of an unidentifiable object in the center of town. The phenomenon ends a day later, with the object gone and all of the town’s residents seeming to be completely unaffected apart from losing a day. Then a few weeks later, they learn that every woman of childbearing age who’d been inside the radius of the phenomenon has become pregnant, and they’re all waiting nine months to meet their mysterious visitors.

Notes
This story is obviously familiar, both because it’s been adapted both under its own title and as Village of the Damned, and also from pop cultural references like Grant Morrison’s creation of “the Stepford Cuckoos” in his run on X-Men.¹Teenage clones of Emma Frost who were all psychically linked! But I’m pretty certain that I read it when I was younger, and I wasn’t exactly sure what to make of it.

I’m still not exactly sure. My main take on it after reading it in 2025 is that it is overwhelmingly British. In fact, the first half of the book is so over-the-top in its stiff-upper-lip attitude that I started to wonder if I’d been misinterpreting it all along, and it was intended as a very dry comedy instead of sci-fi horror. The first half of the book almost plays like a comedy of manners, as the residents of this town have to deal with such indelicate topics as unwed mothers. It’s all viewed with a kind of semi-sympathetic detachment as the leaders — the intellectual men of the higher classes — use reason, modern technology, and organization to sort out all of the logistics of the problem.

It reads as comically chauvinistic, as all the women are flighty and impulsive and prone to emotional outbursts, but god love ’em they’re the strongest of us, etc etc.

Mild spoilers: the second half of the book, however, is mostly taken up by lengthy dialogs in which the main male characters discuss the implications of what is happening, and what a proper advanced English civilization should do in response. This is where most of the action of the book takes place, most often relayed second-hand, or in the form of a tense scene described in a circumspect way followed by pages and pages of men talking about it to try and make sense of it.

It was especially telling, to me at least, that the scene that is described as if it were the most shocking and unsettling in the entire story is one in which a man of higher rank is forced to have a kind of mental and physical breakdown by one of the Children. The idea of dozens of women being forced to carry alien babies to term and give birth to them is mostly glossed over with not even a hint of body horror, while the idea of a proper British man losing his shit is described as if it were so invasive and degrading that the narrator can barely even think of it.

That is the overriding tone of the entire book, the idea that British attitudes and culture made them uniquely suited to dealing with this problem and coming up with some kind of long-term solution. But it’s just as interesting that the book makes it clear that it’s the British sensibility and civic/political order that makes them uniquely vulnerable. That, I believe, is intended to be the most unsettling long-term horror of the book: the optimism that civility and rationality can tackle just about anything, confronted with an external threat that simply can’t be defeated by civilization and reason.

Verdict
A short (but somewhat dense) classic that is absolutely a product of its time — in particular the feeling of post-WWII uncertainty — and still resonates not just because of its sci-fi horror premise, but because of the idea of our own vulnerability on a cosmic scale. The various adaptations have put the most vivid images of the book squarely into pop culture, but not the aspects that it seems Wyndham found the most genuinely horrifying.

• 1
  Teenage clones of Emma Frost who were all psychically linked!

Book
Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Synopsis
Montserrat is a film buff working as a sound editor in the struggling film industry of early 1990s Mexico City. Tristán is her best friend since childhood, a former telenovela star whose fame was ended by a car crash that killed his girlfriend. A chance meeting starts their friendship with a director who’d made several beloved horror movies in the 1960s, before his career ended with an infamous unfinished film titled Beyond the Yellow Door. He reveals that the film had been made in conjunction with a Nazi sorcerer, who’d planned it to be the incantation of a dark, powerful spell….

Notes
I picked this one up for spooky season in 2023, based on how much I enjoyed Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, and of course Silver Nitrate‘s fantastic cover. I’d assumed that this would be for the horror B-movies of the 50s and 60s what Mexican Gothic had been for gothic horror: a modern take on genre fiction that wasn’t a deconstruction, but an actual recreation with modern sensibilities.

Silver Nitrate is not that. Since it’s got a Nazi warlock casting black magic spells in Mexico City, it’s obviously got some of the trappings of classic horror movies. But its protagonists aren’t just living inside a genre story; they’re aware of the genre and are able to comment on it. But the two books do share an assertion of Mexico as a vibrant culture that defies attempts by Europeans to colonize it and Americans to outshine it.

The other thing it has in common with Mexican Gothic is that I wasn’t crazy about the pacing. My main criticism of the former book is that I felt like the climax came way too early; the last half was just an extended case of reacting to the villains revealing themselves and their entire plot. With Silver Nitrate, I felt the opposite: it spends so much time in the build-up that we don’t really get to enjoy the payoff. The story felt like it really got interesting once magic was revealed and we got to see the manifestations of it, but by that point, it was already rushing towards its conclusion.

A more minor criticism is that a lot of the dialogue felt like recounting the author’s knowledge of film history and Mexican film history in particular, and it didn’t seem natural as a result. I’m well aware that nerds talking about their favorite subjects can go on at length, but it still usually manages to feel more conversational and less like a well-researched article.

Verdict
A fantastic premise, a fun story, and an interesting look at movie history from the viewpoint of Mexican filmmakers, which I almost never see.