Things We Lost in the Fire

January 2, 2017
Morbid tales of contemporary Argentina animate Enriquez’s memorable collection of short fiction. In “The Dirty Kid,” a privileged woman comes to believe that the homeless boy who lives outside her building has been the victim of a beheading, only to later learn that his fate is much more complicated. A young girl inexplicably disappears into an abandoned home, never to be seen again, in “Adela’s House,” while a broken-down car causes a tenuous marriage to disintegrate in “Spiderweb.” At their best, stories such as “An Invocation of the Big-Eared Runt” recall Stephen King at his most literary, grounding supernatural horror allegories in a detailed realist tableau. But even the weaker sections convey the singular strangeness of life as a woman in Argentina, where instability seems to haunt every facet of existence—the electricity, the currency, the concept of family—and sudden, otherworldly violence is always at one’s doorstep. Enriquez’s debut collection is elevated by its vivid locale and its deft inclusion of genre sensibilities.

December 15, 2016
A dozen eerie, often grotesque short stories set in contemporary Argentina. This debut collection by Buenos Aires-based writer Enriquez is staggering in its nuanced ability to throw readers off balance. In the opening story, "The Dirty Kid," a graphic designer becomes obsessed with a homeless pregnant woman and her son, a mania that worsens when the decapitated body of a child is dumped nearby. The author's rich descriptions of narcos, addicts, muggers, and transvestites quickly transport readers to an alien world. There are two very different tales of haunted houses in "The Inn," in which a tourist hotel built on a former police barracks contains forces unknown; and "Adela's House," in which the title character steps through a door in an abandoned house--and is never seen again. "The Intoxicated Years" is a sly accounting of five years of increasingly severe drug use among a clique of friends. Then there are the truly monstrous stories that are likely to make readers peek between their fingers. In "No Flesh Over Our Bones," an anorexic woman anthropomorphizes the human skull she finds in the street. "Vera and I are going to be beautiful and light, nocturnal and earthy; beautiful, the crusts of earth unfolding us. Hollow, dancing skeletons." In "The Neighbor's Courtyard," a depressed woman is convinced a neighbor has chained up a young boy until she's face to face with the feral, fanged boy, who eats her cat: "Paula didn't run. She didn't do anything while the boy devoured the soft parts of the animal, until his teeth hit her spine and he tossed the cadaver into a corner." Still others reveal hidden humanity. In "End of Term," two unwell girls find common ground. Finally, the title story chronicles a bit of mass hysteria in which women start self-immolating as a protest against domestic violence. A rich and malcontent stew of stories about the everyday terrors that wait around each new corner.

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February 1, 2017
These stunning, incandescent stories by Argentine writer Enriquez are her first to be translated into English, and each one crackles with sophisticated weirdness, illuminating everyday activities against the underbelly of the macabre. The Dirty Kid presents an unnerving, sympathetic portrait of life on rough city streets, in which Enriquez renders graphic details with uncanny precision, luring readers into the brutal, repellent scene. The Inn deftly balances small-town rumor, budding sexuality, and inexplicable hauntings when two teenage girlfriends plan to prank a local innkeeper and witness the inexplicable. Spiderweb takes place in an equally eerie roadside motel on the Paraguayan border, where a truculent husband goes missing without a trace. Many of these stories flirt with the supernatural or suggest strange coincidences, but others embrace literary horror with cackling glee. End of Term takes up the familiar trope of a possessed child and makes it new with the concise, unsettling narration by a classmate who witnesses every step of the ensuing unraveling. Similar to Shirley Jackson and Jac Jemc, Enriquez is certain to dazzle and discomfit.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

September 15, 2016

Black magic, heartbreak, street kids, derelict houses, a child who kills babies, and women who protest domestic violence by setting themselves on fire. Argentine-born Enriquez's dark and febrile imagination has attracted international attention; this collection has sold to 20 countries.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2017

This is the first taste English-language readers are getting of Argentine writer Enriquez's imaginative stories. Each piece contains an entire universe, with sparse, well-chosen details bringing to life the neighborhoods of Buenos Aires, the smaller Argentine towns, and the daily existence of characters. Some begin with characters' personal problems, such as "The Neighbor's Courtyard" and "Spiderwebs," before the paranormal appears (or seems to appear). Whether these apparitions are real or the manifestations of troubled minds is unclear. Other stories, such as "End of Term" and "Adela's House," are more classic ghost stories one could imagine whispered around the campfire (e.g., "She went through the door in the wall and was never heard from again!"). There are also stories in which groups practice barbaric rituals, including "The Dirty Kid" and "Under the Black Water." VERDICT Fans of modern magical realism in the vein of Kelly Link will eat these tales up, although they may occasionally turn the stomach. Essential for readers of Roberto Bolano, Paul Auster, or any literary fiction that tends toward the uncanny. [See Prepub Alert, 8/8/16.]--Kate Gray, Boston P.L., MA

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.