Here’s the thing.

While the setup is fresh and Montserrat’s resilience carries the book like a champ, Silver Nitrate stumbles into a swamp of horror clichés that even a cursed film reel can’t salvage. We’ve got the tortured artist with a shadowy past, the creepy old mentor who knows too much, and a romantic interest who’s just brooding enough to make you roll your eyes. The occult intrigue starts strong, but by the midway mark, it’s like Moreno-Garcia decided to lean hard into every trope she could pluck from the B-movie bin at Walmart.

This novel doesn’t waste time explaining things to an outsider. If you don’t get it, you don’t get it. And that’s part of its magic. The world Jones builds is immersive and insular; white people exist in the periphery, almost like background noise, and that in itself is a powerful narrative choice. Indigenous horror doesn’t have to justify itself to a colonial gaze. This isn’t a story about suffering for the sake of sympathy—it’s a story about an indigenous community, by an indigenous writer, told in a way that doesn’t dilute itself for mass consumption.

Audition desperately needs a modern rewrite. For all the vivid, visceral imagery Ryu Murakami delivers, the premise feels like a dusty relic from the late 90s—full of the kind of misogyny audiences come to expect (and roll their eyes at) from this genre. Swap the "audition" idea with some college frat bros scheming in a raunchy early-2000s dude flick, and the story would hardly change.

Khaw’s prose doesn’t care if the reader can’t keep up. Sentences hit like jagged waves, rolling over each other in dense, poetic heaps. At times, readers will find themselves gasping, not for breath, but for clarity.

Another thing: as a creative type, “fact is stranger than fiction,” is a quip I’ve always hated, furiously. However, Ward may be the first evangelical to effectively prove how mystifying (not just horrifying) the truth can be. Further inspired by the CIA’s MK Ultra experiments, this novel may in fact be a glimpse into possible philosophy and thought of what the modern world may perceive as “supernatural” Phenomena—among many other things.

Similar to the unsettling discomfort of yanking out one strand of hair or accidentally lifting a nail bed briefly against the edge of a table, Bazterrica’s flavor of horror is breakneck, deliciously nauseating, and will not be easily forgotten in the annals of any reader’s sensational memory.