Argentinian writer Mariana Enriquez exploded on to the literary scene with her collections of grotesque, disturbing stories Things We Lost in the Fire and the International Booker prize-shortlisted The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, which explored violence against women and the aftermath of the horror of her country’s dictatorship. Her first novel translated into English, Our Share of Night, had a more mixed reception, but her new collection of tales, translated by Megan McDowell, reminds us why she’s one of the best modern practitioners of the form.
Enriquez has never been one to pussyfoot about when she can achieve her effects by grabbing the reader hard. Her earlier collections featured body horror – a girl pulling out her fingernails with her teeth; a woman throttling a zombie baby – that became part of a movement for literary dystopias from South American female writers, including Samanta Schweblin and Fernanda Trías.
The opening story of A Sunny Place for Shady People starts in a grim neighbourhood with “kids selling crack on the stairways” and a narrator whose mother “died screaming” of cancer because she was allergic to morphine. As people die, by violence or their own hand, our commentator becomes a sort of ghost whisperer, caring for dead strangers in a city where compassion is scarce. In a neighbourhood meeting about immigration, one man “declares that the police should display the heads of these ‘illegals’ on stakes, like in colonial days. No one opposes him, or even rolls their eyes.”
The dictatorship and male violence are more shaded than in Enriquez’s earlier collections. But if Argentina here is a sunny place – the title savagely ironic – where “there’s more money in crime than in lawful work”, it simply means that the horror has seeped down from the political to the domestic. One narrator lives in a household of “constant misery”, where even death is not the end: her mother’s suicide, far from providing “a huge relief”, is just “a burden I hadn’t asked for and didn’t want to carry”.
It is Enriquez’s great gift that she can make stories with ugly subject matter so addictive and full of life. She works best with a high concept: in Face of Disgrace, a woman finds her facial features being erased as a response to intergenerational trauma; in Hyena Hymns, a woman puts on a dress taken from a house once used for torture and finds it cutting open her body and organs.
The difficulty for a writer in carving such a distinctive space is that it’s easy to tip into shtick. Sometimes Enriquez overdoes it, as in Night Birds, which features women turning into birds, a narrator whose skin turns green and falls off, and two men whose bodies are fused into a jaguar. It becomes hard to see the substance below the cluttered surface.
So it’s refreshing when some of the stories offer more subtle effects. (In the Enriquez universe, a woman having sex with ghosts, in the story Julie, counts as a subtle effect.) The Refrigerator Cemetery has a more low-key grotesquerie, as children playing in a field of abandoned fridges experience an outcome both expected and surprising. In the brilliant Metamorphosis, a menopausal woman who finds herself patronised by her doctor (“You’re going to love not menstruating any more”), takes back control of her body by making unusual use of a two-kilo fibroid she had removed.
Enriquez saves, if not the best story, then the most insidious, for last. In Black Eyes, set in a city with a growing homelessness problem, a pair of strange children keep politely insisting on being allowed into the narrator’s car. The scene at the end of the tale, and the end of the book, is perhaps the most unsettling of all. In a society like this, it says, terror, like truth, cannot be kept hidden for long.
• A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enriquez (translated by Megan McDowell) is published by Granta (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
