A Sunny Place for Shady People

April 1, 2024

Enriquez, whose story collection The Dangers of Smoking in Bed was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, offers a new 12-story collection of literary horror. The tales feature ordinary people who encounter the surreal and supernatural, from ghosts to birds that used to be women. Prepub Alert.

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Starred review from July 15, 2024
Enriquez (The Dangers of Smoking in Bed) offers a masterful collection full of grotesque body horror, red-hot terror, and mysterious events, revealing the pain and loss endured by women in modern-day Buenos Aires. In “My Sad Dead,” Emma, a doctor, is routinely visited by the ghost of her mother, who died from cancer, and the ghosts of three teenage girls who died in a recent drive-by shooting. For Emma, the apparitions amount to a veritable “ghost pandemic,” caused in part by her neighborhood’s uptick in violence, where there’s “more money in crime than in lawful work.” In “Face of Disgrace,” the narrator tells of how his mother suffered from a dreadful disorder where her facial features began disappearing years after she was raped by a faceless man, and the erasure is passed down through the generations. “Metamorphosis” portrays a perimenopausal woman lamenting her body’s transformation (“No one tells you, there’s no warning. Your skin dries out, the fat builds up on your hips and legs, and the cellulite deepens from one day to the next”). She has a fibroid removed during her hysterectomy, and later has it implanted on her spine to restore her sense of feeling complete in her body. Enriquez’s stories gain their power through surprise, as they often begin with a realistic setting before taking a terrifying or unsettling swerve, and she brilliantly explores themes of guilt, shame, and vanity. These provocative tales are first-rate literary horror. Agent: Maria Lynch, Casanovas Lynch.

Starred review from August 1, 2024
Readers blown away by Enriquez's Our Share of Night (2023) will welcome McDowell's bravura translation of the author's new collection of horror stories. Enriquez's darkly humorous world view throbs throughout these weird and riveting tales, exerting the morbid fascination of a train wreck. There's the menopausal woman who can't let go of the benign fibroid tumor removed from her uterus, bringing it home for a thoroughly modern and grotesque transformation. Another woman keeps an eye on the ghosts inhabiting her neighborhood, including her own problematic mother. Enriquez also presents a trio of murdered teen girls and a burglar who died from a fall. While most of the characters are palpably human and narrate in the first person, others are ethereal. Set mostly around Buenos Aires, the stories invoke images from the torture and degradation of Argentina's past military dictatorship. This evil presence seeps into and wafts up from the crevices of abandoned lots and institutional spaces, which transform into dreamscapes and leave physical wounds. This political charge brings real traumatic depth and texture to tales that are creepy enough to bring a shiver to every reader.

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August 15, 2024
A dozen pitch-black Argentinean stories laced with body horror, self-incrimination, and existential dread. Enr�quez'sOur Share of Night (2023) earned her a prominent place among innovative South American writers, and the stories here deliver the same squelchy charms. The stories, mostly from the POV of women, offer some new perspectives in an already rich genre, while the horrors within range from pedestrian to Lovecraftian to surprisingly equal effect. Opening with a ghost epidemic and closing with dead-eyed children, in between Enr�quez examines the human condition through a spattered lens of body horror and grotesque surrealism. Following the ethereal "My Sad Dead" and its portrayal of a lonely doctor looking after lost souls, things tend to bounce back and forth between the ordinary and the phantasmagoric. In the first of many everyday nightmares, the title tale tackles the story of Elisa Lam, a Canadian student whose body was discovered in a water tank on the roof of the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles circa 2013. Twisting a real-life tragedy into a mystery involving suicide and a death cult only makes it that much worse. Some entries are more notion than narrative--"Face of Disgrace" extends the concept of faceless victims to its literal conclusion, while "Night Birds" and "Metamorphosis" both twist Kafka's themes of transformation to their own purposes. "Hyena Hymns" takes the form of a ghost story of sorts, unearthing eerie imagery from the ruins of a wealthy landowner's domestic zoo. Ironically, the stories are much more devastating when they don't delve into the supernatural. Two childhood friends are marked by a game gone awry in "The Refrigerator Cemetery," giving off vibes from Stephen King's short story "The Body." Meanwhile, a search for dresses results in unexpected self-discovery in "Different Colors Made of Tears," and a painter's obsession spirals into madness in "A Local Artist." An uneven collection that nonetheless solidifies Enr�quez's reputation as a purveyor of haunting and thought-provoking tales.

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