Montserrat has always been overlooked. She’s a talented sound editor, but she’s left out of the boys’ club running the film industry in ’90s Mexico City. And she’s all but invisible to her best friend, Tristán, a charming if faded soap opera star, though she’s been in love with him since childhood.
Then Tristán discovers his new neighbor is the cult horror director Abel Urueta, and the legendary auteur claims he can change their lives—even if his tale of a Nazi occultist imbuing magic into highly volatile silver nitrate stock sounds like sheer fantasy. The magic film was never finished, which is why, Urueta swears, his career vanished overnight. He is cursed.
Now the director wants Montserrat and Tristán to help him shoot the missing scene and lift the curse . . . but Montserrat soon notices a dark presence following her, and Tristán begins seeing the ghost of his ex-girlfriend.
As they work together to unravel the mystery of the film and the obscure occultist who once roamed their city, Montserrat and Tristán may find that sorcerers and magic are not only the stuff of movies.
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6 books in catalog
Re-imagining classic horror, dark fantasy, and historical noir through Mexican folklore and history, speculative fiction has found new depth in books like Mexican Gothic. Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a Mexican-Canadian author, editor, and publisher whose versatile bibliography spans a wide array of subgenres, from 1950s jazz-infused urban fantasy to 1920s Mayan mythology.
Known for combining distinct period settings with gothic atmosphere and cultural heritage, her work has earned major speculative fiction accolades, including the World Fantasy, Locus, and British Fantasy awards.
Born on April 25, 1981, in Baja California, Mexico, Moreno-Garcia grew up in various locations throughout the country. Her parents worked at radio stations, surrounding her with extensive vinyl record collections, while stories from her great-grandmother in Hidalgo inspired an early appreciation for oral storytelling. After discovering classic horror literature through Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft as a child, she moved to Canada in 2004, later settling in Vancouver and earning a Master of Arts in Science and Technology Studies from the University of British Columbia.
Describing herself as "Mexican by birth, Canadian by inclination," Moreno-Garcia began publishing short fiction in the mid-2000s and expanded into editing and publishing through Innsmouth Free Press. She edited notable horror anthologies, including Cthulhurotica and the World Fantasy Award-winning She Walks in Shadows (released in the United States as Cthulhu's Daughters). She published her debut novel, Signal to Noise, in 2015, establishing a pattern of exploring a distinct subgenre with each new project.
Moreno-Garcia's approach to writing is marked by genre fluidity, deliberately shifting styles, eras, and narrative structures between books rather than repeating established templates. Her narratives frequently reframe standard Western literary motifs—such as Lovecraftian mythos, vampire lore, or mad scientist tropes—through Mexican history, mythology, and regional folklore.
Central themes across her catalog include the impacts of colonialism, social class divisions, family secrets, and cultural displacement. Grounded in meticulous historical research, her stories balance vivid atmospheric world-building with nuanced characterization across various historical periods, including Jazz Age Mexico, the 1950s silver-mining estates, and 1990s Mexico City.
