Designed to provoke shock, discomfort, and debate, A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enriquez is a new collection of short stories from the Argentinian queen of Latin American Gothic. Enriquez’s macabre tales centre around the very notion of haunting, be it literal, or a manifestation of psychic or societal trauma. From one woman’s infatuation with her surgically removed fibroid to a community of birds who were once unruly women, Enriquez interweaves mythology, history, and the darkest imaginings, in her exploration of horror and humanity.
In a dozen discombobulating tales of varying potency, the stand-out read for me is My Sad Dead, set in a crime-ridden Argentinian neighbourhood. Here we meet Emma, a 60-year-old doctor living with her mother. Emma and her neighbours are fearful in this hotbed of mugging, crack dealing and murder, their community safety meetings often a united howl of rage and literal call to arms. But unlike others in her community, Emma doesn’t advocate capital punishment for illegal immigrants and ‘deadbeats’. She also refuses to move out.
‘I stay because my mother lives here. Can I say that about a dead woman?’
Returning as a ghost after an agonisingly awful death, Emma’s distraught mother wanders the house, and Emma attempts to pacify her. It’s what she does best, and something she’s spent many years doing in her hospital career, although in-patient ghosts tend not to stay calm. There are just too many of them and they feed off each others hysteria, much as their counterparts in the corporeal world do.
When Emma’s similarly overwrought neighbours discover her gift, they start to come and see her in secret. The local epidemic of violent crime appears to be coinciding with an epidemic of ghosts, and one spirit in particular is set to add to Emma’s burden of supernatural care whilst conferring shame upon her cynical community.
In her fiction, Enriquez is often grimly reflective of the political and historical scars on her home continent, and the strongest stories in this collection capture those elements of social tension and discord.
In Face of Disgrace, a young woman named Alex looks in the mirror one day to discover that her mouth looks curiously blurry. A later peek shows one of her eyes appearing to fade away, as if ‘someone had used an eraser in Photoshop.’ Panicked, Alex rushes to hospital, only to be given a vague diagnosis of viral infection.
In fact, she’s gradually becoming a faceless woman, a supernatural manifestation of generational rape trauma and the harm wrought by silence. In this frankly terrifying tale, the fast-fading Alex must consider how to break the cycle.
In her disquieting dozen, Enriquez pulls no punches with language and utterly chilling imagery. A vengeful ghost has eyes that are ‘alive, totally alive, insect-like, with the buzzing shine of beetles’, a veiny fibroid has ‘a kind of tuber-like head and an extra little head, as if it was still growing. Like a hormonal ginger root.’
An electrifying blend of horror and social commentary, this new collection is both shudder-inducing and utterly compelling.
A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enriquez is translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell and published by Granta Books, 272 pages.
If you like this, see also Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez.
