A Sunny Place for Shady People, Mariana Enriquez

15 Oct

A Sunny Place for Shady People is Mariana Enriquez’s latest offering of short stories, following her 2022 novel, Our Share of the Night. Horror is something that she’s perfected to a tee over her literary career, and this collection has raised the stakes for everybody in the genre to an entirely new level.

This was such an enticing collection of stories. Ranging from a girl who tries on vintage dresses, only for them to mark her instantly with terrible wounds, to a woman who wants her fibroid attached to her, to a story centred around the disappearance of Elisa Lam, these stories were all perfectly creepy. The Dangers of Smoking in Bed and Things We Lost In The Fire left a lot to live up to, but Enriquez more than exceeds them in her latest collection.

Enriquez has been a favourite author of mine for a while, and one of the reasons for this is because she so expertly blends literary and horror genres to confront the everyday atrocities that women face throughout society: intergenerational trauma, abusive relationships, familial struggles. This highly intelligent way of interrogating such issues and the surrealness and supernatural edge to her writing serve to embolden these topics, rather than blurring them.

The stories are translated by Megan McDowell who, as ever, does a stellar job at bringing Enriquez’s stories to life for an English speaking audience; they’re deeply unsettling, darkly humorous and, like all good horror movies and books, you can’t look away – even for a second.