All however one of many tales in A Sunny Place for Shady Individuals – the third short-story assortment from Argentinian creator Mariana Enríquez to be translated into English by Megan McDowell – concern hauntings, and ghosts. In My Unhappy Useless, a comparatively prosperous suburb bordered by crime-ridden slums is suffering from the apparition of a teenage boy shot lifeless in a theft. In The Struggling Girl, a make-up artist experiences visions of a stranger’s sluggish decline into terminal sickness. In Black Eyes, three volunteers for an NGO helping the homeless of Buenos Aires have a blood-curdling encounter with two ethereal little boys carrying lederhosen.
The haunting is Enríquez’s perennial theme, and a phrase that, as she famous in an interview across the publication of her novel Our Share of Evening, has no actual conceptual equal within the Spanish wherein she writes. “The closest could be ‘embrujado’,” she informed the Southwest Evaluate, “however that’s bewitched. ‘Maldito’, however that means a curse … We additionally use ‘encantado’, however that’s enchanted. ‘Fantasmagórico’, one other phrase in Spanish that’s close to to ‘haunted’, shouldn’t be precisely it both.”
Enríquez is positing her work as an act of translation in itself: a transposition of the conventions of European gothic horror to the Latin American world. As she places it, “translation of a practice and its lexicon that doesn’t essentially mirror Spanish phrases and even descriptions”.
Pondering of Enríquez’s work on this manner deepens my appreciation of her constant deal with the dynamics of the supernatural encounter, wherein she attracts on influences as various as Arthur Machen and Anne Rice. It additionally highlights this assortment’s major defect: an allegorical repetitiveness that drains a few of these tales of their energy to shock or really unsettle the reader. All of them are definitely competent workout routines in horror, however probably the most thrilling for me had been people who took a breakneck spin into different generic territories.
Take the title story, as an example. In A Sunny Place for Shady Individuals, a journalist from Buenos Aires travels to Los Angeles to jot down an article on the cult that has unfold round Elisa Lam, a younger Canadian lady who drowned beneath mysterious circumstances in a water tank on the roof of a lodge.
Because the journalist kilos Skid Row and visits the houses of outdated associates, she is haunted by one other recursive spirit: that of her lifeless lover, Dizz, who struggled with an habit that finally claimed his life. The story is a neon-lit noir that looks like one thing contemporary from Enríquez. Fairly than merely presenting a brand new variation on the haunting-hauntee dynamic, A Sunny Place asks deeper questions on {our relationships} with the lifeless, each individually and communally. What if we wish to be haunted? Can we get hold of horror to expiate guilt, or confront our trauma? The interpolation of Elisa Lam’s case – a real-world tragedy whose macabre particulars have for a decade been grist for the true-crime mill – makes these questions really feel particularly germane.
Enríquez can also be superb at comedy. In Metamorphosis – a narrative that features probably the most alluring description of a bloated cyst I’ve ever learn – a middle-aged lady indulges in excessive physique modification. Julie, wherein a troubled younger lady is shipped to Argentina to endure psychiatric therapy, is a type of ghostly satire on middle-class politesse and diasporic id. A lot of Enríquez’s narrators share a type of matter-of-factness that yields some hilariously chilly one-liners: “Constructive considering is perverse, similar as goodwill,” or “I don’t like outdated individuals … I roll my eyes when some worker on the store takes days off as a result of their expensive outdated granny died. Who, I’m wondering, can endure from that demise a lot they’ll’t go to work?”
At her finest, Enríquez has an unrivalled intuition for the subtly appalling picture, a Lynchian (David, not Paul) sense of how horror inheres inside the benign – the stain on a hammock in a vacation rental, the roadside icon whose sickly pallor evokes demise, a mouthful of wine spat over a kitchen desk, “like watered-down blood on the white Formica”. One other spotlight of the gathering is Face of Shame, wherein the generational trauma attributable to an act of sexual violence is literalised because the recurrent visitation of an infective, faceless entity (a genuinely horrifying imaginative flourish typical of Enríquez: regardless of having no mouth, this entity whistles because it pursues its prey).
General, nevertheless, A Sunny Place for Shady Individuals feels uneven in its improvement. There are some tales right here which might be conceptually sturdy, however really feel sketchy or banal of their realisation, as if they’d initially been written to a restrictive phrase rely or deadline and by no means expanded to the complete size they wanted. There are situations when Enríquez’s prose suffers from the sort of dilatory imprecision that some reviewers discovered so offputting in Our Share of Evening. At one level, a row of outdated fridges within the yard of an deserted manufacturing unit are described as “ineffective white and beige home equipment of all sizes, organized in traces like a labyrinth of lifeless troopers”, whereas the manufacturing unit itself looms overhead “like a lure of poisoned sweets, crowning the devastation”. A row of deserted fridges may definitely be made menacing, however this glut of simile blurs the image past recognition.
There have been additionally situations of what felt like overly literal translation on McDowell’s half. In A Native Artist, a younger holidaying couple have “all of the elements wanted for an intense breakfast”, as an alternative of “opulent”, or merely “massive”. Or in Nightbirds: “Mother lower the only real of her foot when she walked barefoot” – not incorrect, simply syntactically awkward and redundant. Individually, these and different situations of maladroit writing didn’t disturb my pleasure on this assortment too significantly, however cumulatively they contributed to the slapdash high quality that among the tales possessed.
As a fan of Enríquez since 2018’s Issues We Misplaced within the Hearth, I was disenchanted that this assortment oscillated so usually between an excessive amount of and too little. However it did nothing to shake my conviction that Enríquez, when she does simply sufficient, is fairly a lot unbeatable.
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