Maríana Enriquez’s story collection, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, published in Argentina in 2009 but translated into English in 2020, leans into the macabre and imbues the horror genre with cultural specificity. Most of the stories are set in or around Buenos Aires, and many involve both spiritual phenomenon like local folklore and Afro-Brazilian myths, as well as Argentinian cultural and political events, such as a the military junta that submitted Argentinian citizens to human rights abuses for almost a decade, no doubt contributing to the poverty and violence in cities referenced throughout the collection. This collection has gained notoriety owing in part to its place on the International Booker Prize shortlist, where it is one of six books vying for the top prize in translated literature. The Booker Prize committee says in its citation of the collection: “The stories walk the uneasy line between urban realism and horror, but with a resounding tenderness toward those in pain, in fear and in limbo. As terrifying as they are socially conscious, the stories press into the unspoken – fetish, illness, the female body, the darkness of human history – with bracing urgency”.
In this citation I believe the committee has touched upon this collection’s strongest point: Enriquez’s ability to seamlessly incorporate Argentinian social and political realities into the horror genre. The stories have a gritty realism to them, even when the subject matter is fantastical or otherworldly, and this grounds the collection in a strong thread that extends through each story. Enriquez grew up in an Argentina suffering under the yoke of a military dictatorship, and thus we see the themes of repression, powerlessness, poverty, abuse, and violence against women and children showing up again and again in her work. In many stories, the past rears its ugly head and refuses erasure: in “Rambla Triste” a woman visits friends in Barcelona and is confronted by the rotten stench that can be attributed to the city’s abused and neglected children who walk the streets in the afterlife, and in “Back When We Talked to the Dead” a group of teen girls communicate with the dead through a Ouija board, but some cannot connect with their dead or missing relatives, as they had “disappeared” (likely during the political turmoil caused by the dictatorship).
Many of the stories focus on the stories of women and children, and Enriquez seems to have a strong affinity for the powerless, those who are victimized without any means to retaliate. In “No Birthdays or Baptisms”, a young girl’s parents are concerned about her extreme self harm, which she believes a demon has forced her to do, and they hire a cameraman to film her during one of her episodes to prove that there is no demon. The cameraman voyeuristically films her body, marveling how “slender and destroyed” she has become, and ends up refusing to give her the tape and keeps it for himself. In this story the self harm is incredibly disturbing, but the story concludes with the cameraman’s betrayal of his subject, which is the ultimate disempowerment of this young women, and feels like a strong condemnation of a man who has chosen to transgress this girl’s bodily autonomy.
The longest story in the collection, “Kids Who Come Back”, touches upon all of the previously discussed themes in fascinating ways. The story is narrated by a young woman who is working in Buenos Aires’s missing children archive, who is shocked when all of the city’s missing children begin showing up in the city’s parks ready to return home. But something is amiss: the children return exactly as they were on the day they went missing, with no account for the years they have been gone, and even children who were confirmed to be dead have shown up in the parks miraculously. One by one, the parents return the children, outraged that this child who has returned to them is not their own, and afraid of what this mysterious and otherworldly child might be. But the unsaid thing that may also be plaguing these parents is guilt, as many of these missing girls “fled from a drunken father, from a stepfather who raped them in the early morning, from a brother who masturbated on to their backs at night”. The story speaks to the violence that has befallen children and young girls in this urban landscape, include a young trans sex worker who the narrator becomes preoccupied with, and the return of these otherworldly children forces the city to confront this violence in really uncomfortable ways.
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is an unsettling but fascinating collection of short fiction that refuses to shy away from the social ills of the society it is rooted in, and connects brutal history to unconventional horror plots. Enriquez’s prose conjures up a dark magical realism that leads us to question what horrors lie in everyday life, and what ugliness has been buried by history or culture. These stories shed light on characters that many would like to ignore, and gives voice to many victims of injustice, poverty, and violent crime, whom the more fortunate would like to pretend don’t exist at all. This collection is a beautifully rendered and readable addition to the horror fiction canon, and its unique merits make it a vital piece of our globe’s literary landscape.
Further Reading: Things We Lost in the Fire, Enriquez’s first story collection translated into English, offers similarly macabre and thrilling prose in bite-sized story form. If you enjoyed the literary horror and spookiness, definitely check out anything by Carmen Maria Machado.