The home has since changed hands our narrator believes if she can recover the bones of the angel baby, perhaps she will finally be at rest. In the opening story, Angelita Unearthed, our narrator is haunted by the ghost of a rotting dead baby, believed to be her great-aunt, who was buried in the backyard of her old family home. Yet, despite the nature of many of these stories, there is often an absurd joviality. Nothing is sacred or spared invitation, and it feels important to warn readers that these stories cover murder, dead babies, cannibalism, child sex trafficking, suicide and a wide spectrum of fetish behaviours (amongst other dark themes). Ghosts, monsters and the unknown pale in comparison to the macabre antics of the fictional humans Enríquez creates. I’m yet to read the latter, but if it is anything like this (and as several Goodreads reviewers tell me - it surpasses what Enríquez has started here), then I cannot wait to get my hands on it.Īcross twelve short stories, Enríquez manages to walk that perfect line in psychological horror where the ‘scary’ things become nothing in comparison to the reality of what humans are capable of. While The Dangers of Smoking in Bed (2021) is the newer of releases in English from Argentinian writer Mariana Enríquez, it’s actually a collection of her earlier work that took longer to be translated than Things We Lost in the Fire (2016).
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