Realism is no longer sufficient to tell the truth about the horrors of our societies.
The horror helps to tell about it.” What the Argentine writer Mariana Enríquez says in an interview while visiting Berlin sums it up.
And at the same time it sounds like a programmatic battle cry for an exciting experiment that female authors from various Latin American countries are currently conducting: the reinvention of horror literature.
At first it was just a curious fringe phenomenon, but now it's a phenomenon that has been given different names: "Latin American Gothic", "anomalous realism", "feminist horror".
But whatever you want to call it, these terms connect the works of several women writers who use, reinterpret, and recast hallmarks of the horror genre in order to bring the dark sides of Latin America to light in a way that is as captivating as it is disturbing.
The Argentinian Mariana Enríquez is the internationally most prominent representative of this movement.
She is best known for her collections of short stories Los peligros de fumar en la cama (The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, 2009), which was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, and What We Lost in the Fire, a bestseller , which was also published in German by Ullstein in 2017.
These stories are meticulously constructed machines that have thrilled fans of the genre with established horror motifs - sects, haunted houses, ghostly figures.
Beneath the narrative surface, however, the author's stories deal with very real misery: depression, poverty, ecological catastrophes or violence.
Her most important work to date was also published in German a few weeks ago: “Our part of the night”.
The novel tells of the complicated relationship between a terminally ill man plagued by visions and his young son.
Both are forced to serve as mediums for a secret society that tortures people and performs barbaric rituals in a quest for eternal life.
And because Mariana Enríquez fearlessly deals with violence in her eight-hundred-page book, links different time levels and plays with literary forms, the novel was compared to Roberto Bolaño's "2666", which has since become a classic of modern Latin American literature.
"Our Part of the Night" received the famous Herralde Prize in Spain and is also extremely exciting as a horror novel.
However, its power and explosiveness have to do primarily with the historical background: with the last years of the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983, and the social uncertainty that accompanied the return of democracy.
The protagonists' permanent fear of persecution and violence becomes a symbol of the fear of millions.
The cult's ruthlessness becomes a metaphor for the crimes of the dictatorship, the torture and murder of thousands of people, the kidnapping of children and the disappearance of more than 30,000 people.
The way in which ghostly elements blend with allusions to authentic evil in Enríquez's books is representative of the work of a number of other authors who also look at Latin American reality through the filter of horror fiction.
What makes their stories so terrifying is the reference, often only hinted at, to real grievances, to Latin America's immense inequality and the indifference – or brutality – of its institutions.