There is magic in the work of Silvia Moreno-Garcia, even when the story she’s pursuing isn’t overtly magical. The genre-bending novelist (Mexican Gothic, Silver Nitrate) infuses every page with a sense of mythic power, ensuring that readers will be gripped, while also channeling the feeling of a fairy tale that could turn dark at any moment. With The Seventh Veil of Salome, Moreno-Garcia turns that remarkable gift to a Hollywood story and conjures another piece of prose magic.
Inspired by the biblical legend of Salome and its long cultural trail, the story focuses on three women. Vera Larios is unexpectedly thrust into the spotlight when she nabs the leading role in The Seventh Veil of Salome, the latest sword-and-sandal epic to emerge from the Technicolor machine of 1950s Hollywood. Nancy Hartley, an aspiring actress who’s so far been consigned to bit parts, is instantly filled with fury, believing the role to be hers. Then there’s Salome herself, who is caught in the middle of a power struggle in the first century while falling in love with a mysterious and rebellious preacher who threatens to bring turmoil to Galilee.
As each narrative moves forward, Moreno-Garcia captures her characters’ strikingly vivid emotions—Vera’s longing for creative transcendence, Nancy’s lust for success and Salome’s tortured matrix of desire and duty—all while examining the power structures and influences, often male, that threaten to box them in. Each of these women wants something, and their desires and fears weave together across the story, driven by the evocative and carefully structured prose, which is so precise that it’s impossible to mistake one woman’s story for another even as they mirror and complement one another. Vera’s story is not Salome’s, even as she’s playing Salome. Neither is Nancy’s, even as her own desire for agency and power turns darker. Instead, Moreno-Garcia leads readers to question how the legend of Salome has informed our view of driven, creative, seductive, influential women through the ages. It’s an ambitious idea, and one the author captures without ever losing the book’s vivid drive.
The Seventh Veil of Salome is another triumph from Moreno-Garcia, a page-turning historical drama with mythic overtones that will please readers of her realistic fiction and her more fantastical work alike.
