“How do you run from something that doesn’t exist?” the Argentine writer Mariana Enriquez asks in her new story collection, “A Sunny Place for Shady People.” She then fills her 12 scorching pieces with enough horror to make this reaction seem reasonable, no matter the puzzling immateriality that causes us to flee. I begged my family’s pardon multiple times while reading, gasps escaping from my mouth.
The horror in Enriquez’s work is never gratuitous. It drops a supernatural lens over our actual monsters: misogyny, dictators, corruption, cruelty, sexual violence, addiction and poverty.
“A Sunny Place for Shady People” maintains an intimate, sisterly relationship with horror. It is close and familiar; we touch its skin casually, nearly lovingly. The book begins: “First, I think, I should describe the neighborhood. Because the neighborhood is where my house is, and my house is where my mother is.” The ghost of this mother, who has died from cancer, is a steadying presence for the narrator. The dead, for Enriquez, contain us like nesting dolls. The dead make an architecture for the living.
Throughout the book, Enriquez emphasizes the morte in mortification. In “Night Birds,” a deliriously powerful story, the narrator rots alongside and inside the home she refuses to leave, embarrassed by her decaying face and the fact that she is most likely already dead. (“Night Birds” was written, the author notes in a subtitle, under the influence of the painter Mildred Burton, who, though often misidentified as a Surrealist, insisted that her work came not from dreams but real life.)
Enriquez also writes novels, including “Our Share of Night” (2023), but the thrill of reading her short stories comes in tracking her obsessions across tales: rotting faces, dangerous fashion, art that entrances, and bodies — sexual bodies, sick bodies, distorted bodies, dead bodies. These eerie echoes are rewards for our attention — though, really, it’s hard not to pay attention here as each step forward feels wildly dangerous.
“The man who raped me … didn’t have a face,” the mother of one protagonist tells her. “It was erased.” Then the protagonist’s own face begins to disappear. Generational trauma scars our DNA, suggests Enriquez, who grew up in Argentina when thousands of dissidents and their children were murdered or disappeared. The question by the end of this story is: Can the protagonist make it home to tell her own daughter everything, to speak of past horrors before she is silenced, her mouth gone forever?
In the brilliant story “Different Colors Made of Tears,” a rich old man sells his dead wife’s exquisite collection of designer gowns he bought for her that are so steeped in violence that they bruise and cut any woman who dares to try them on. Despite the seething sadism of the old man, Enriquez does not arrive at easy villains. As Julio Cortázar does in “House Taken Over” or Amparo Dávila in “The Houseguest,” Enriquez offers entangled indictments of wealth, beauty culture, marriage and misogyny.
There is no leaden moralizing in “Hyena Hymns,” perhaps her most fearsome piece. Lovers who survive a haunted house make a pact of silence:
“Don’t tell me anything that happened in the castle. Don’t tell anyone,” he whispered into my ear.
“I don’t know what you are talking about,” I replied.
Perhaps the worst horror is in pretending the source of our fears can be buried, ignored or dismissed as supernatural. “Those who think they see ghosts are those who do not want to see the night,” Maurice Blanchot wrote. Enriquez illuminates both the night and the ghosts, and she rejects her characters’ paralysis. She refuses silence and crafts stories so searing they cannot be buried or ignored.
The post Horror That Illuminates Humanity’s True Monsters appeared first on New York Times.