In “Kids Who Come Back,” one of the stories in The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, Mariana Enriquez describes the contents of the MySpace page of a 14-year-old girl who’d run away from home. “She completed the information requested with a strange mixture of truth and macabre fantasy,” Enriquez writes. “She was a fan of heavy metal and horror movies. She called herself ‘Vagabond of the Night,’ described herself as ‘the worm that lives in every death,’ and claimed to be 103 years old. She’d left the space for ‘About me’ blank, and for ‘Who I want to meet,’ she’d put ‘Everyone.’”
This passage stands out first for its perfect literacy in the awkward self-mythologizing tendencies of that Paleolithic social media platform, not to mention the melodrama and surly exuberance of teenage and young adult vernacular, which Enriquez calls upon more than once in her new collection. But it also stands out for its apt summary of her aesthetic: the hard realism of the suburbs, cityscape, and historical residue of Argentina combined with the uncanny entities and elements that lurk within, invade, and upend it. It’s a helpful rendering because while Enriquez’s truth is, even far north of Argentina, recognizable enough, her macabre fantasies are various and unnerving — and not a little bit metal.
Enriquez garnered the esteem of book clubs across the Anglosphere with her debut 2017 collection, Things We Lost in the Fire, filled with brutally unflinching depictions of the dark side of contemporary Argentine life: not only the woes of people and families but the lingering trauma of the Dirty War, with its faceless military dictatorship and its thousands of desaparecidos. Her narrative vision is driven by violence, precarity, and unease, written in prose both visceral and comic. Four years later, she returns with The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, a collection of similar length (12 stories at under 200 pages) with a similarly pyrocentric title and translated again by Megan McDowell. If the new material is too much of an echo (common, to be sure, in most short-story collections), at least here the reader can better appreciate the mechanics of Enriquez’s bleak procession.
A typical story in The Dangers of Smoking in Bed plays out like a very modern fable, retaining the moral force and psychological insight but narratively better suited to the cynical tendencies of a contemporary readership. In “The Cart,” residents of a neighborhood fall into a series of misfortunes after mocking a vagrant. Businesses fail, jobs are lost, houses get robbed, and the neighborhood falls into chaos, losing electricity and food. Only one family is spared, but rather than be exemplified for their virtues, the family members feign hardships so as not to be found out. In “Our Lady of the Quarry,” several teenage girls pine for the same man, but when he dates their older friend, one of them prays to a shrine next to a quarry pool to have both of them mauled by “slobbering pony-dogs.” Another group of teenagers in “Back When We Talked to the Dead” use a Ouija board to talk to the ghosts of desaparecidos they’ve known to determine their whereabouts, only to discover that the ghosts are as much in the dark about their fates as everyone else is and aren’t especially pleased to be disturbed.
Like Dan Chaon, Carmen Maria Machado, and others of her generation, Enriquez treats speculative literature less a genre unto itself than a narrative utility. They take cues, of course, from Shirley Jackson, Daphne du Maurier, and Robert Aickman, even if they trail somewhat behind these predecessors in grace and subtlety. Enriquez’s use of the supernatural is nothing that can’t be found in classic horror in any medium. It’s rather that her urban landscape is so dismal that only ghosts and hexes can color it.
“Rambla Triste” turns urban angst and paranoia into a conspiracy in which the ghosts of abused and neglected Catalan children imprison jaded Argentine expatriates in a Barcelona neighborhood. “The Well” is a stark portrait of a girl’s anxiety disorder, never mind that her grandmother, mother, and sister had their own neuroses transferred to her via witchcraft, giving her “nightmares about the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Christ’s open chest that bled and drenched her face in blood, about Lazarus, pale and rotting as he rose from a tomb among the rocks, and about angels that tried to rape her.” “The Lookout” centers on a ghost called “The Lady Upstairs,” who haunts a coastal hotel and preys on vulnerable, traumatized female guests:
Better to bring her back to the tower again, the next day.
And lock her in.
And maybe reveal her true form before leaving her alone up there.
And keep the guests and the owners from hearing her screams. The Lady Upstairs was capable of controlling what reached people’s ears and what didn’t.
However, it is the cluster of more literally visceral works that are a class of their own. “Meat” is another story of teenage obsession. A mysterious rock star commits suicide, and two of his fans become notorious on their own when they exhume his corpse and cannibalize it. “Where Are You, Dear Heart?” is about a woman with a fetish for malfunctioning hearts, and not just their sounds. “No Birthdays or Baptisms” takes an offbeat videographer into a home to record a girl who claims an entity is assaulting and mutilating her. These stories bring Enriquez closer to full horror authorship, exhuming the remains of the gory S&M and metal-adjacent splatterpunk movement of the 1980s and bringing its inert aesthetics up to date. These stories, moreover, are a more fitting display of her skills as a storyteller.
If its didactic qualities — its use of history, class and gender issues, and fable-esque social critique — were less amenable to our time, Enriquez’s narrative style would probably be more divisive than it is. She prefers the sensory to the atmospheric and seems impatient with the lyrical ambiguity the supernatural traditionally fosters. The supernatural for Enriquez is concrete rather than suggestive, an inextricable part of her landscape. Every corner is haunted. Spirits dwell in dirty apartments where her female protagonists live alone, in abandoned prisons that shelter runaways and sex workers, in dingy government offices, on public transportation, and in relics of worship where old religion intersects with even older religion. Her spirits are as unhappy as everyone else.
Enriquez’s fiction is the fiction of brick and mortar but also flesh and bone. And the flesh of the dead is still flesh. “It’s not exactly practical to try and strangle a dead person,” one narrator says, “but a girl can’t be reasonable and desperate at the same time.”
Chris R. Morgan is a writer from New Jersey. Follow him on Twitter: @CR_Morgan.
