Velvet was the Night by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia


When I first heard about Mexican Gothic and Velvet was the Night by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia I hurried out to buy both. The novels were set in Mexico, and were written by a Mexican author. I like all things Mexican, so why not? They got good reviews, too.

I started with Mexican Gothic, and it was . . . just okay. I wished I hadn't, in my enthusiasm, bought two novels by an author who didn't, in the first work of hers I read, delight me. The good news is, though, that Velvet was the Night was delightful. It is, like Mexican Gothic, Moreno-Garcia's take on a genre: historical noir.

I guess if I had to choose I'd always take noir over gothic, so maybe it's not a surprise that I preferred this account of Mexico in the 1970s, when the country was still under the heel of the repressive PRI. A young woman, activist-adjacent, disappears, and with her some photographs that will compromise that repressive government by showing their involvement in a recent riot. A street kid who calls himself Elvis (he is a great admirer of the King), and who works for a secret paramilitary organization, is one of the people searching for her. The other is a prim secretary named Maite, who becomes involved only because the missing woman was her neighbor; she was feeding that woman's cat while she was away for "a few days." In alternating strands we follow them on their searches. The strands, of course, after crossing here and there in the course of the narrative, come together at the end in a rather delightful way.

Moreno-Garcia seems to specialize in doing versions of different types of genre fiction. Maybe I'll try another one of her genre-reboots further down the line.

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