Once again, Mariana Enríquez is here to draw us into a world of horrors that lies just beyond our field of vision. In A Sunny Place for Shady People, translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell, terrors wait in reflections and shadows. In these stories, a woman sees a dying woman in the reflections that go on forever between her two mirrors; vintage dresses spawn bruises, scars, and wounds on their wearers’ bodies; and children with black orb eyes run on all fours.
These chilling stories evoke the feeling of creeping dread that’s becoming the hallmark of the new wave of Latin American horror led by women authors—no jump scares here, just a steady pulsing of adrenaline, not enough to find relief, just enough to keep you from falling asleep. Our access to this genre is only feasible thanks to McDowell, an American translator who is also known for translating the works of Samanta Schweblin, another giant of this growing wave of socio-psychological Latinx horror.
In Megan McDowell’s strong translation, Enríquez is at her best combining fantastical flair with real-life horrors that we prefer to look away from—particularly gendered ones. Her stories dip into domestic violence, sexual assault, and fear of illness and the body’s many internal workings. Many of her protagonists are lonely, grating women with difficult opinions, who distance themselves from others.
Alex, the protagonist of “Face of Disgrace,” is one such woman. She never helped care for her aging mother—that was her brother’s work—and now shares custody of her daughter with an ex-wife. Alex does her best to manage on her own, and becomes annoyed when others intrude into her business. When her face begins to sag, and then blur, she begins to panic. It scares her daughter to see it, and scares strangers too. Her brother tells her what her mother never did: they have a generational curse of violence, a man who whistles without a face, a trauma followed by their own faces disappearing for good. She hasn’t experienced the violence, but she wonders now if it all could have been prevented if the generations had simply told their daughters the truth—and now she doesn’t know if she’ll have time to do so.
Themes of complicit silence, generational trauma, and the difficulty of seeing others’ suffering and trying to look away, make sense for an author who dealt beautifully with Argentine history in her debut novel, Our Share of the Night. The novel, also translated by McDowell, engaged with government suppression and enforced silence, and with repressed pain from a time of disappearance and hidden violence. Some of Enríquez’s tales in this collection draw on that history directly, as in “Hyena Hymns,” in which a gay couple explore a former detention center. Others explore it more obliquely in stories where the rich are able to ignore problems that others cannot, or in “My Sad Dead,” in which a woman in a bad neighborhood stands up for the ghosts that prowl its sidewalks.
Among all these stories are bodies that feel transgressive to the protagonists. Some are difficult to look at, others are neglected or abandoned, from the bloat of a dying woman’s stomach to a cut-open smile to a massive fibroid removed from a woman’s uterus. These bodily horrors, violent twists, and nuanced emotional reactions are vividly written, leaving the reader in a whirl of discomfort and ticklish tension.
But sometimes, the transgressions feel less successful, less like they push past a cultural stereotype, and more like they thud up against them. “Julie” hinges on the reader’s ability to see fatness as pathetic at best, monstrous at worst. The protagonist pities her cousin, who has ghost lovers, and whose parents want to commit her for life. There is some feeling of acceptance for Julie at the end, but the depiction of her fatness as demonstrative of some kind of horrifying excess and indulgence, as a key part of what makes her so undesirable, is impossible to get past. In another story, a narrator compares a monster to kids from a place “that took in children with deformities or delays,” making an unnecessary link between the moment of horror within the story, and the unacceptable reaction too many see in disabled bodies.
This is the sometimes unfortunate side of horror: just as often as it can be radical and challenge conventions, it can also fall victim to the same reductive stereotypes we see around us everyday. Though it’s a thin line, it’s one worth discussing, if only because Enríquez herself seems so preoccupied with similar questions of power, violence, and their impact on people, particularly marginalized ones. Are these stories meant to point at the protagonists’ own failings, and so our own, or are they slips into the world Enríquez so often criticizes? Either way, the stories feel somewhat flatter for it.
FICTION
A Sunny Place for Shady People
By Mariana Enríquez, translated by Megan McDowell
Published by Hogarth Press
September 17, 2024
