Tales of everyday terror

The Argentine author Mariana Enriquez is best known for two collections of petrifying short stories and a grand gothic horror saga, Nuestra parte de noche (2019; Our Share of Night, 2022), published to critical acclaim and commercial success. Her fiction, including the International Booker-shortlisted Los peligros de fumar en la cama (2009; The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, 2021), has captured the imagination of a readership ranging from academics to BookTok fans, and crosses macabre fantasies with the cruellest aspects of modern life.

In the five years since Nuestra parte de noche appeared, devotees have been treated to a collection of her journalism, a reissue of her first novel (Bajar es lo peor: a cross between My Own Private Idaho and Interview with the Vampire) and an expanded volume of her essays about cemeteries, Alguien camina sobre tu tumba (2013). Her latest set of short stories, Un lugar soleado para gente sombría (A Sunny Place for Shady People, forthcoming) returns to the model that made another of her collections, Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego (2016; Things We Lost in the Fire, 2017), such a success: takes on the unexpected and the terrifying, rooted in a contemporary Argentina scarred by poverty, inequality, sexism and the long legacy of the dictatorship.

Where the twelve new stories differ from earlier efforts is in flaunting their fantastical elements so openly: the American horror writer Thomas Ligotti is cited repeatedly and Stephen King is referenced directly or indirectly in more than one tale. The supernatural is always near with Enriquez, but in earlier works, such as the title story of Things We Lost in the Fire, everyday life, with its misogyny and eruptions of violence, can be as terrifying as anything emerging from other realms.

In Un lugar plots revolve around ghosts, apparitions, unexplained powers and the sudden, shocking arrival of bizarre hybrid creatures: a human worm, child-spiders, women transformed into birds. The collection is more “weird” than “eerie”, to use the theorist Mark Fisher’s categories. We move through each story as though in a funnel: following the realist and realistic opening, with a small cast of characters, believable narrators and contemporary, mostly urban settings, come claustrophobia-inducing nightmares, often spattered with blood and body parts. Only “Metamorfosis”, which addresses a woman’s ageing process, is set firmly in this world, albeit in one of its more lurid subcultures. Here the narrator has her extracted tumour turned into a grotesque piece of bodily adornment.

Cinema and television feed Enriquez’s collection, with nods to the Japanese horror film Dark Water and Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs. The book’s title – which is both a quip from W. Somerset Maugham about the French Riviera and the title of an album by the post-rock band Glacier – sums up the twin literary and popular instincts of her writing. Enriquez is a music correspondent for the Argentine daily Página/12, and rock and pop references are threaded through her fiction. Her most revered musician is Nick Cave – another artist fond of high body counts – and her favourite band are the Welsh provocateurs Manic Street Preachers. But Suede, formed in London in the late 1980s, with the flamboyant singer Brett Anderson and (briefly) the virtuoso guitarist Bernard Butler at their heart, have been a decades-long obsession. In the 1990s Enriquez would beg and cajole friends overseas for the band’s cassettes, VHS tapes and fanzines. More recently their album The Blue Hour (2018) played on a loop while she corrected the proofs of Our Share of Night.

That revelation comes in Porque demasiado no es suficiente, Mi historia de amor con Suede (“Because Too Much Is Not Enough: My love affair with Suede”), a book that mixes biography and album and concert reviews with a dive into musical obsession. Enriquez is fascinated with fandom: her own for this band, and other, much stranger, even disturbing instances of fans turning threatening or even violent against their idols and/or themselves. For Enriquez Suede’s songs are inseparable from the experience of growing up as a working-class outsider in a grey suburban town, whether in Britain or Argentina. In the second volume of his autobiography, Afternoons with the Blinds Drawn (2019), Anderson contrasted his music with that of Blur, with their cartoon Englishness and faux-cockney accents, or the boozy football chants of Oasis. Suede sketched dirty and bleak cityscapes, which they aspired to transcend through artistic ambition. One can see their appeal for an anglophile writer growing up in a post-industrial suburb in Buenos Aires province.

This is not merely a case of musical preference. The author confesses a particular fascination with Neil Codling, a latecomer to the band dubbed “the thinking fan’s crumpet” by their biographer, David Barnett. Sitting smoking behind his keyboard, Codling looked the part of a disaffected rock star, and cultivating a look, Mariana Enriquez argues, is central to a band’s appeal. For those of a certain generation who can remember (let’s say) the teenage frenzy of a mosh pit at the Cambridge Junction in 1993, she provides a vivid reminder of a group who, for all their melodrama and even absurdity, deserve a place in rock’s firmament and continued, if perhaps more restrained, admiration.

Ben Bollig is Professor of Latin American Literature and Film at the University of Oxford. His most recent book, edited and translated with Mark Leech, is Sergio Raimondi: Selected poems, 2023

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

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