A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enriquez
| A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enriquez | |
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| Category: Short Stories | |
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Reviewer: Heather Magee
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| Summary: The queen of Latin American gothic horror returns with this chilling collection in which her settings feel uncanny: otherworldly yet eerily familiar. It is a thrilling read with plenty of social commentary and grizzly detail. Perfect for the spooky season. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 272 | Date: September 2024 |
| Publisher: Granta Books | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 978-1803511238 | |
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Mariana Enriquez writes horror that is disturbingly real, achieving this uncanny familiarity by basing her paranormal plots on gritty realities: her settings include an abandoned field full of disused refrigerators due to an urban planning mishap, an overcrowded homeless shelter and a crime-ridden neighbourhood where safety meetings are routine - all within Argentina. The circumstances of her characters are so plausible that the supernatural or otherworldly horror which seeps into these spaces adopts a similarly tangible texture.
Embedded within Enriquez's eerie narratives are layered themes of Latin American—and particularly Argentinian—identity, as well as the complex experiences of womanhood. She deftly plays with common stereotypes about Argentines, using them to shape her characters while exploring the intricate heritage of displaced Latinos. In one story, a family of rich blonde latinos of German heritage is branded as a group of gringos, and this sense of dislocation is echoed in the titular story (A Sunny Place for Shady People) where a trio of friends living in the U.S. switches between Spanish and English as the young Latina women joke about their varying degrees of Latinness.
Enriquez's female characters defy convention—they are menopausal, nymphomaniacs, or cursed by some inherited matrilineal affliction. This abject femininity seems to be a parody of the monstrous-feminine in popular culture, rather than a perpetuation of it. For example, in Julie, the eponymous protagonist's overbearing sexuality and unruly voraciousness results in ritualistic (s)exorcisms and grotesque insatiability in her habits surrounding food that feels carefully caricatured. The story Face of Disgrace is about a woman whose face gradually melts away due to a mysterious inherited disease rooted in the narrator's own mother's rape trauma. The story reminded me of Enriquez's The Things we Lost in the Fire (2016), in which an epidemic of men burning women's faces incites a resistance movement of women who resort to self-immolation in protest.
In another story from the collection, an elderly man's perverse fantasies of domestic violence against his late wife are inscribed into the garments she leaves behind to be enacted on whoever wears them next, like the spectre of his violence tragically destined to be repeated. Within Enriquez's fiction, the scars of female oppression are cyclical and manifest themselves visually as unhealed, ugly wounds.
While Enriquez weaves in contemporary references to ground her stories in the present, occasional mentions of the pandemic or pop culture icons like Taylor Swift feel somewhat jarring, breaking the otherwise immersive spell of her narratives.
The collection reads very well, the translation is accomplished and each story haunts its reader like the ghosts that populate their pages. If you like this collection, you will almost certainly love the dark world of You Will Grow Into Them by Malcolm Devlin, which also combines everyday horror and the supernatural in short story form.
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