Mariana Enriquez writes horror about Argentina, and Argentina supplies most of it.
The dictatorship that ran from 1976 to 1983 disappeared perhaps thirty thousand people. Bodies went out of aircraft over the Río de la Plata. Children were taken from murdered parents and handed to military families. Much of it has never been resolved, plenty of the responsible are still alive, and the country lives on top of all of it.
That’s the material the Mariana Enriquez books are made from. Her ghosts are the disappeared, her haunted houses are the ones where things happened, and her possessed children are the ones the state took. She isn’t using history as a metaphor for horror, she’s using horror to write about history that the ordinary tools can’t reach.
She’s also a working journalist and deputy editor of a Buenos Aires newspaper supplement, and the fiction carries a reporter’s specificity about poverty, drugs, police and the texture of a city falling apart in some districts while it gentrifies in others.
The translations are all by Megan McDowell, who is the reason Enriquez reads as well in English as she does, and who is worth following in her own right.
I haven’t read these. What follows is the critical consensus.
Fiction by René Rehn
The Short Version
Read Things We Lost in the Fire. It’s her first collection in English, it’s twelve stories, and several of them rank with the best short horror written this century.
Then Our Share of Night if you want the novel, and clear a fortnight, because it’s six hundred pages and worth every one.
The Short Fiction
Things We Lost in the Fire (2017)
2016 · translated by Megan McDowell · 2017
The collection that made her name in English, and the place where most readers meet her.
Her signature move is the ending withheld. In “Adela’s House,” a derelict house on an otherwise normal block swallows one of the three kids who go in, and neither the survivors nor the decades that follow ever produce an answer. “Under the Black Water” closes at the moment something breaks the river’s surface, and the page simply runs out there.
Buenos Aires itself does half the haunting. The villas, the Riachuelo carrying its industrial filth, cops who kill, and everywhere, never named directly, the weight of a state terror still inside living memory, still unpunished. The stories don’t lecture about any of it. It’s simply the ground they stand on.
In the title piece, a wave of self-immolation spreads among women, an organized answer to the men who have been burning them, and Enriquez follows the logic to its end without flinching.
“The Intoxicated Years” and “Spiderweb” are the other two people name.
Also on horror short stories.
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed (2021)
2009 · translated by Megan McDowell · 2021
Written before Things We Lost in the Fire and translated afterwards, which is worth knowing, because it’s rougher, stranger and less controlled.
Twelve stories. A girl obsessed with a dead boy’s exhumed bones. A woman whose neighbor’s baby won’t stop crying, and who isn’t certain the baby is alive. A group of teenagers who find their idol’s grave and start visiting it.
“Kids Who Come Back” is the longest and the best. Children who have disappeared from Buenos Aires across decades begin returning to a plaza, exactly as they were, at the age they vanished, and the city has to decide what to do with them.
The connection to the disappeared goes unstated, and doesn’t need stating.
It made the International Booker shortlist. The earlier stories run more explicitly grotesque, and several readers prefer them for it.
A Sunny Place for Shady People (2024)
2024 · translated by Megan McDowell
Twelve more stories, the most recent collection, and the register has shifted.
There’s more Los Angeles and Barcelona in it and less Buenos Aires, and several pieces follow expatriates, tourists and people who have left, which is new territory for her.
“Metamorphosis” gives you a woman who has her uterus removed and starts collecting body parts. “Julie” involves a girl whose sleep paralysis has an occupant. “The Refrigerator Cemetery” is a place where abandoned appliances accumulate, and so does something else.
The rough agreement runs that it’s more uneven than the first two collections, and that the best three or four pieces stand with anything she has written.
Her interest has been moving toward bodies, and toward horror that arrives without a political frame, which some readers welcome and others count as a loss.
Read the earlier collections first.
The Novel
Our Share of Night (2023)
2019 · translated by Megan McDowell · 2023
Juan can speak to the dead, and worse than the dead. A wealthy cult calling itself the Order owns his services, using him as their channel to something they name the Darkness, and every session takes years off his body. His small son Gaspar carries the same gift, and the Order has plans for him.
It’s six hundred pages, it runs from the 1960s to the 1990s, and by a number of serious readings it’s the best horror novel of the decade. The Order’s rituals genuinely disturb, the father-and-son material devastates, and the dictatorship runs underneath everything: the cult and the junta draw from one well, and the bodies the rituals consume are the same bodies the regime throws from planes.
It won the Premio Herralde in Spanish, and the English reception was extraordinary.
Fair warning that it gets graphic, particularly in the ritual sections, and that the middle third takes a long detour some readers find hard going.
The Nonfiction
She has been a working journalist for thirty years, at Página/12 in Buenos Aires, and that’s not incidental to the fiction.
Someone Walks Over Your Grave is a travel book about cemeteries. She visits them across several continents, writes about the architecture, the burial customs, the tourism and the specific atmosphere of each, and it’s exactly the non-fiction you’d expect from somebody who writes her fiction.
La hermana menor is her biography of Silvina Ocampo, has not been translated into English, bit it’s regarded as the most important thing she has written outside the stories. Ocampo was the third of the Buenos Aires trio with Borges and Bioy Casares, was married to Bioy, and spent a lifetime being diminished by proximity to both men.
Enriquez wrote the book that finally established her properly.
That’s also the lineage in plain view. What Ocampo did, cruelty inside domestic settings, told without commentary, is what Enriquez does now.
Where to Start
Read Things We Lost in the Fire, and if you only read two stories, make them “Under the Black Water” and the title piece.
If the collection works on you, commit to Our Share of Night, which is the major work.
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is the odder collection and the better one for readers who like being unbalanced.
And read the Mariana Enriquez books knowing that the history underneath them is real, recent and unresolved, which is what separates her from everyone else writing in this register.
The whole shelf is ranked on my best horror books list. Her best work is short, and my horror short stories list has the company she keeps.
