There’s something thrilling about other people’s suffering — at least within this collection’s 12 stories of death, sex and the occult. Horrors are relayed in a stylish deadpan ... Enriquez’s plots deteriorate with satisfying celerity ... Largely it’s insatiable women, raggedy slum dwellers and dead children — those who are ordinarily powerless — who wield unholy power in this collection, and they seem uninterested in being reasonable. And Enriquez is particularly adept at capturing the single-minded intensity of teenage girls ... If some of these stories end vaguely, the best ones close on the verge of some transgressive climax ... To Enriquez, there’s pleasure in the perverse.
Enríquez again delivers intrigue and brutality ... Stories of spirits and disappearances collectively address the mystery of loss through narratives that are as gripping as they are chilling. The not-quite-horror tales address death while showcasing the intensity and resiliency of the human soul, particularly souls of women ... The title story is the book’s shortest and in just a few pages delivers a tragic glimpse into a lonely woman’s existence. Experiments with fire point to the delicate boundaries of life ... These stories play with reality, questioning the very fabric of the ingrained beliefs and infrastructures that hold us up. They reveal how frighteningly precarious they really are.
... the connection between the violence in these pages and that in the country’s past is, by and large, ingeniously oblique ... Although Enriquez writes about a world that’s haunted by the horrors of the past—both the all-too-real incidents of history and the more nebulous menace associated with superstition and folklore—these tales aren’t traditional ghost stories. But she is interested in the way past darkness contaminates the present ... Enriquez pushes into territory that makes most of us uncomfortable ... Well worth any upset they cause, these glittering, gothic stories are a force to be reckoned with, and Enriquez’s talent and fearlessness is something to behold.
... [Enriquez's] gothic fantasies are unsparing and grotesque ... Yet because the fiction is so alive, the experience of being in her world is enjoyable. Some credit must go to Megan McDowell, who has translated both of Enriquez’s collections into excellent English, nimbly switching from the lyrical to the idiomatic, the metaphysical to the obscene ... What’s remarkable is the assurance of Enriquez’s voice, which makes her most outrageous inventions seem coherent and convincing. Details—an insect, a dog, a cigarette—that may at first seem randomly chosen reverberate through a story, reappearing in unexpected ways. These recurrences create a kind of substructure, giving her stories the 'inner consistency' that, according to J.R.R. Tolkien, is necessary to persuade readers to suspend their disbelief long enough to accept the reality of an imagined world more fantastic than our own ... I’ve been grateful to Mariana Enriquez for using these stories about bugs, a miserable marriage, a provincial beauty, a spooky vision seen from an airplane, a hot blond truck driver, and many unexplained disappearances to illuminate dark historic truths. One can read these stories as pure, high literary gothic horror, Latin American surrealism in the age of Twitter. But surely ghost story means something else for a writer from a country where thousands of people vanished into thin air. And once you see the background, it’s difficult to unsee it.
Enriquez returns with another book of short stories, each one equally breathtaking, off-kilter, even deranged ... While Enriquez’s indelible images will sear themselves into readers’ memories, it’s her straightforward delivery and matter-of-fact tone that belie the wild, gasp-worthy action unfolding on the page. This makes for surprising, occasionally gut-wrenching reading.
... ravishing ... a volume that reimagines the Gothic and gives it a wholly original spin ... Enríquez mines her inner Poe: Her characters grapple with ghosts and their own hauntings. Their spirits are low, but the stakes couldn’t be higher ... While Enríquez's prose is precise and disciplined, her soul is pure punk, the opposite of the 'elegant' Allende, whom she reveres ... Enríquez is also a clinician of the body, dissecting her characters—sometimes literally—with a surgeon’s scalpel. The decay of our physical selves, the fears of an afterlife, and sudden surges of sex ignite these stories with a blue flame; her exploration of female self-pleasure is both erotic and chilling ... establishes Enríquez as a premier literary voice. Enríquez's extraordinary—and extraordinarily ominous—fiction holds up a mirror to our bewildering times, when borders between the everyday and the inexplicable blur, and converge.
When it comes to book reviewing cliches, the word 'haunting' is surely among the tattiest, yet Mariana Enríquez’s newly translated short story collection restores to that tired adjective all its most mysterious, fearful strangeness ... shares the exuberantly macabre sensibilities of her English-language debut, Things We Lost in the Fire, which it in fact predates ... There is nothing wraithlike about these apparitions. Instead, they acquire a pushy, malevolent physicality, not so much ghosting Enríquez’s generally female protagonists as possessing them, driving narratives that work a similarly tenebrous magic on the reader, even as gross-out details are layered on like a dare ... Pornography, paedophilia, necrophilia – nothing is out of bounds here, but there is jet-black humour, too ... She’s already attracted comparisons with Shirley Jackson, but lashings of local mysticism and a flair for transgressive imagery make her an arrestingly original talent. Do all of these stories come off? Not quite. Nevertheless, it’s a collection amply deserving of its spot on the longlist for this year’s International Booker prize.
The short stories of Argentine author and journalist Mariana Enriquez are seeing machines—lenses that throw the uglier side of the human condition into uncomfortably sharp focus. She shows us horrors (both historical and otherworldly) that the naked eye doesn’t want to see ... Characters in Enriquez’s stories aren’t poor; they’re witnesses to poverty ... What makes Enriquez’s fiction so affecting is how grounded the world that these phantoms pass through feels ... These characters are just trying to maintain and cope with an existence that’s precarious enough without having to deal with dead things and spirits, too ... The people in Enriquez’s fiction are exhausted, horny, resentful, ambitious. Most often they’re women just trying to take charge of their own lives and break free from the chauvinistic society that often poses a greater threat to them than the specters do ... Another running theme that Smoking In Bed shares with Enriquez’s previous collection is how her characters’ inner and outer lives are shaped by historical traumas. The disappearances of the Argentine junta crop up across many of these stories. Authority figures can’t be trusted: The cops are violent and lazy, the social workers are overburdened and unsupported, and the soldiers are just looking for an excuse to ruin lives ... If this all sounds unbearably heavy, it should be noted that Enriquez’s prose is full of enough wit, lyricism, and goosebump-inducing creepiness to make these stories page-turners.
Enríquez again delivers intrigue and brutality ... Stories of spirits and disappearances collectively address the mystery of loss through narratives that are as gripping as they are chilling. The not-quite-horror tales address death while showcasing the intensity and resiliency of the human soul, particularly souls of women ... The title story is the book’s shortest and in just a few pages delivers a tragic glimpse into a lonely woman’s existence. Experiments with fire point to the delicate boundaries of life ... These stories play with reality, questioning the very fabric of the ingrained beliefs and infrastructures that hold us up. They reveal how frighteningly precarious they really are ... But then, what is this 'horror?' Where does it come from to animate this particular set of 12 robust stories? It is not exactly figurative, the occult of these tales, but rather, as in most of Enriquez’s superb work to date, rooted in culture .. One other delicious pattern is the scatological as receipt of heartbreak, loss, erasure. The physical manifestations of love (or its lack), and of betrayal, the physical reflecting the evil performed on the loving. That is the horror. That is the horror she finds new and wondrous ways of weaving into her lyrically written tales, here expertly translated by Megan McDowell ... In such a way, The Danger of Smoking in Bed underlines the darkness of evil. By allowing a glimpse of its opposite: that light that will give hope, that sign that might show the path back to life for the women on the page, and for the women before it.
... while it certainly is dark, and darkly funny at times, I found it less delicious than desolate: a plunge into the pathologies of modern Argentina in which the marvellous only underlines the misery ... That history adds bitter realism to her multiple occult, gore and fantasy influences in the service of feminist anger against power and impunity, of which the dictatorship was, she has said, just an extreme form ... Enríquez’s unadorned style (in Megan McDowell’s clear translation), proves ideal for the evocation of anguish, mostly that of women, alongside the ghosts, zombies, malignant spirits, black magic and cruel families essential to fairy tales ... More powerful is when the supernatural appears as the materialization of some unspeakable inner pain ... In their emptiness and longing, the defiant fans belong with the young people Enríquez brings unforgettably to life, or the half-life that is their lot.
Enríquez’s prose is always subtle in its suggestiveness, distilling poetic flashes and vernacular dialect into an ideal web that sublimates unadulterated, awesome fear with language of everyday life. Translating Enríquez’s lyrical vernacular — heavy with the slang and cadences of the Río de la Plata and Northeastern reaches of Argentina — is no simple feat. Horror in Enríquez’s fiction often hinges upon brief phrases that endow banal observation with disgust’s cloying sheen. McDowell recasts the horrific use of such idiolectical subtleties via the repetition of banal, unsettling adjectives and a deft use of caesura ... Enríquez’s imaginative project has an unassuming but potent social transversality, through which she has reimagined the post-dictatorial urban middle class’s spiritual life and disentangled its ideological components. She achieves this through a mundane poetics that is not lost to the English reader but captured brilliantly in the surgical brevity and rhythmic persistence of McDowell’s text.
... disquieting ... This introductory story portends the brutally macabre tone of the ensemble ... Enriquez swathes her dozen stories in the viciously fantastical and grotesque, ensuring that her readers never settle ... Through these characters, Enriquez develops the interpersonal effects of Argentina’s larger socioeconomic landscape ... Dangers’s stress on girls and women expertly draws the profound connection between supernaturally tinged horror and the violent degradation of a culture’s most vulnerable ... While Enriquez asserts a sharp political edge in her collection, many stories simply revel in the gruesome and weird ... Each provocative tale elicits shudders and, often, repulsion. With The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, Enriquez carves a space for uncomfortable literature, proving its necessity to an examination of daily horrors.
Her disquieting stories, populated by ghosts, disappeared adults and exploited children, examine economic pain, social unrest and violence through the lens of literary horror. Characters observing the slow burn of a society in decay find themselves asking, as the titular story does, 'Why not just let the fire keep going and do its job?' ... Supernatural elements become compelling metaphors for societal breakdown ... Child exploitation is represented as an actual haunting of society ... Enriquez skillfully uses the tropes of horror to expose the everyday atrocities that occur in societies that abandon the fight against corruption. Even as these stories provide chills, they elicit a deep feeling of sadness for innocence lost.
This is the second collection of hers to be translated into English by Megan McDowell, following 2017’s Things We Lost in the Fire, but in fact The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is the older of the two, having first appeared in Argentina in 2009. It isn’t quite as strong as the other, but it does contain a handful of brilliantly unsettling stories. If you want to wince, flinch, and momentarily panic when you switch on a light, this is a book for you ... While much of horror’s subject matter is universal – a fear of spiders, or being pursued, or, of course, death – it’s often the culturally specific elements that make it memorable ... The other part of the book that will stay with me is its depiction of male violence against women ... Tricking us into waiting for a ghost to 'put out its head', Enríquez surprises us with real horror.
... riveting ... Propulsive dark themes of mental illness, suicide, PTSD, sexual violence, fanaticism, and childhood disappearances are unspooled in these stories. Simply put, they are stories of women (and girls) in crisis. In the hands of a skillful writer like Enriquez, the behavior and actions endured by the girls and women in the story appear mundane. However, that abuse, violence, and mistreatment suffered by the characters have consequences on mental health. While a reader may be able to turn away from these fictional horror stories, in real life, Latin American women continue to be victimized by the crimes of misogyny, sexism, and violence ... In the end, Enriquez does not disappoint—like the lingering muck coating the protagonists in 'Meat,' these are stories that seep beneath your skin. Hallmarks of finely crafted horror.
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed illuminates the pitch-dark netherworld between urban squalor and madness ... Enriquez’s wide-ranging imagination and ravenous appetite for morbid scenarios often reaches sublime heights. Adventurous readers will be rewarded in these trips into the macabre—and hopefully they’ll be able to find their way back.
Twelve gruesome, trenchant, and darkly winking stories set in modern-day Buenos Aires, Barcelona, and Belgium ... Enríquez, a journalist who grew up in Buenos Aires during Argentina's Dirty War—a trauma that echoes across these stories—is a pioneer of Argentinian horror and Spanish-language weird fiction, warping familiar settings (city parks, an office building, a stretch of neighborhood street) by wefting in the uncanny, supernatural, or monstrously human. Drawing on real places and events and spinning them out in fantastical ways, she disinters the darkness thrumming under the smooth, bureaucratized surface of urban life, exposing powerlessness, inequity, abuse, and erasure ... Colonial Catholicism, pop culture, grotesquerie, and local legends intertwine in images of rotting flesh, altars that conceal their true nature, and ritual magic while themes of loss, fate, mental illness, state violence, fear and disdain for the other, and familial obligation—both the abnegation and upholding thereof—run throughout ... An atmospheric assemblage of cunning and cutting Argentine gothic tales. Insidiously absorbing, like quicksand.
