Hernan Migoya
Updated Monday, March 11, 2024-01:16
It doesn't enter my head: how did
Mariana Enriquez (Buenos Aires, 1973)
manage
to endorse her work to a "serious" literature publisher?
No, it's not that she doesn't deserve it, because of her talent she more than deserves it.
But she had never come across such an exceptional case among horror authors in the Spanish language.
And she sees that there are good ones too.
And yes, Enriquez may be better than anyone, but
what she writes are strictly horror stories.
And that had never had a place in the seals of "high literature"
.
Due to its success, another relevant Spanish publisher has told me that for two or three years they will seek to include novelties in the horror genre in their catalog, but only written by women.
Double genre literature.
It seems good to me, we have to take advantage of the pull.
A sunny place for gloomy people
Mariana Enriquez
Anagram.
232 pages.
€19.90 Ebook: €11.99
You can buy it here.
I face
A sunny place for gloomy people
(Anagrama) with the prejudice of having really enjoyed the author's previous story books and deciding that I don't like the title of the new one.
Will you suggest an interested appeal to all the geeks in the world to form a club of misunderstood accidents?
An "I know that you suffer like me and that we are special, buy my book because here you will find your refuge"... In short, it exudes that substratum of proselytizing of rarity that those of us rare people who believe we are even more special find makes teeth grind.
Certain stylistic exhibitionism
Will this dozen stories contain anything on par with
The Cart
in
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed
(2009) or
The Dirty Boy
in
The Things We Lost in the Fire
(2016)?
Furthermore,
his last novel did not convince me:
Our part of the night
(Herralde Prize 2019), compared to the precision of his short stories
, seemed formally "untidy", to use a common adjective of his prose.
Maybe it's that the description of an entire magical universe with its internal logic in 90s Vertigo Comics code is not his thing:
maybe I prefer when he stands in front of the open door to that universe and leaves us hanging there
, merely peeking and sensing the worst, as he does in his very measured stories.
Maybe his success makes me angry, because I'm almost the only one who thinks that way.
But let's get to the purulent point: the volume opens fire with
My Sad Dead
, the story of a neighborhood flooded with ghosts, another incursion that relapses into
the identification between the urban and moral decay of today's Argentina and the flowering of paranormal events
;
and with
The Birds of the Night
, a chronicle full of poetic surrealism around a cursed family.
Both are solvent and somewhat Macedonian stories, in that they share a certain quality of
thematic salad and make us fear that the author's forceful argument has been diluted
in favor of stylistic exhibitionism.
Let's say that they are to her previous stories what
Casino
is to
One of Ours
.
In
The Misfortune on the Face,
Enriquez insists on the atypical family and the rounded phrases (
"Every visit to another house, any house, seemed like an excursion to the world of other people's happiness"
or "...as if behind his depression lurked an incurable voracious night"), through an intrigue of curses unfolded in the first and third person that also appeals to the surrealist air.
The lyricism prevails, subtracting terror from the proposal
.
The fourth cut (to use a discographic or sycophonic simile) presents us with Julie, a girl who
suffers from schizophrenia or, according to her version, an overdose of invisible friends: entities that her mother allowed to pass to the terrestrial plane
during a spiritualist session and that They go so far as to sleep with her.
She's not scary either, but she exudes beauty and empathy.
It is followed by
Metamorfosis
, which uses black humor ("positive thinking is perverse, as is good will") to question the devilish relationship with our bodies.
With a pounding heart
We reach the halfway point with the story that gives the book its title and,
although it has been a long time coming, also the horror
: a journalist investigates the case of a girl who appears drowned in the water tank of a hotel in Los Angeles where a famous man stayed. serial killer.
Here what transmits fear and anguish is the successful atmosphere.
We move restlessly in our seats: a story perfect in its imperfection that will last in us
.
The horrific course persists in
Hymns of the Hyenas
, a descent into a grotesque, cosmic and effective hell like those of Clive Barker;
and with
Different Colors Made of Tears
,
an irresistible fable of bloodthirsty glamor that I would kill to see filmed by the first Neil Jordan
, with another of those unfriendly narrators from the
Marian
repertoire that we like so much for their discoveries of the chill in everyday life.
If there Enriquez
has our absolute complicity, even in the way he gives
vintage
fashion lessons , in
The Woman Who Suffers
he wins us over with the (documented) hazards of the job that his protagonist, makeup artist and cohabitant, exposes in a dimensional intersection with a ghost family
Refrigerator Graveyard
adds a good note to the guilty past subgenre with a retreat to Joyce Carol Oates.
And when we are reaching the safe part of the farewell and we relax for an emotional culmination,
Enriquez suddenly presses the accelerator and throws us against the sharpest cracked windshield of the lot
:
A local artist
refers to the tourist visit of a young Buenos Aires couple to a semi-abandoned town in La Pampa, where a very creepy folk horror cult is brewing;
and
Black Eyes
describes the encounter of a food delivery woman to the homeless population with some spectral Zipi and Zape.
Both texts are terrifying in the best sense and leave you with a thousand hearts
.
Silly, he did it again.
The
Daphne du Maurier
of the Spanish story has given us
three, four, five or more anthological pieces of genre literature
and, possibly, her
most solid book of short stories
.