Sarah Bernstein\u2019s Study for Obedience<\/a>). Enriquez doesn\u2019t lean into this stereotype. Her characters are relatable. They speak to each other in natural dialogue. They work in office jobs or family businesses that are stable at best, monotonous at worst. They live in middle class housing, though often nearby slums. This geography means that their lives are touched by poverty indirectly yet constantly.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAll stories are set in present-day Argentina, and most of them in the capital Buenos Aires. Enriquez works hard to show the country as it really is. The horror of each story breeds comfortably in its Argentinean context, as if to suggest if you talked to anyone for long enough you\u2019d uncover a terror that the country has permitted to develop. The true darkness of Argentina is that these disturbances are not the exception, but the rule. That being said, the Buenos Aires that Enriquez writes is a deliberately modern, globalised city. Characters use mobile phones, talk about world politics and order takeout after a boring day at work. Enriquez is making clear efforts to engage her global audience. This could be any city, she attests. It only takes corruption and degradation to set loose these unbelievable horrors, and your city is only as safe from corruption and degradation as you collectively choose to make it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The issue with the stories is structure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Enriquez needs to flesh out her plots. While interesting to begin with, they abruptly peter out. All of a sudden a piece of exciting, relatable genre fiction will just wrap itself up by the characters simply leaving the haunted area or, completely the opposite, just decide to live with the ghosts as though there’s nothing more that could be said on the matter. It\u2019s poor narrative construction \u2013 completely anticlimactic, and does not serve to express the underlying themes established throughout the story. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The most egregious example is the story Hynea Hymns<\/em> where two boys explore a ruined mansion that ends up leading to a parallel world of untold horrors, only to quickly resolve itself and go back to normal and the story ends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\nWhen he [some demonic Pyramid Head villain of the parallel-world mansion] was about to take the knife to his finger, he disappeared. And with him went the skylight and what was left, if anything, of the beds. The duct tape around my feet. Mateo and I were in a big, abandoned room, similar to the others; that is, we were in the ruins of a castle. And it was daytime. My phone, which was working now \u2013 even the clock \u2013 said that ten minutes had elapsed.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s no moral here. No thematic catharsis. The horror was random to start and then random to end. Sadly, even if you cut that story entirely from the collection, the inability to climax infects every story, not just this one. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It felt as though the collection was a box full of matches that had only one wick to light, and the oversupply came with the knowledge not all will take. The first, struck too quickly, sparked only to flame out and be discarded. Then she tried again with equal impatience with the next match. This time the match broke in half and was quickly forgotten. She wasted no time in pillaging the box for a third. And so on the stories pass by without any acceptable resolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Story: A Local Artist<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
A more hurtful case of poorly thought-out endings took place in the penultimate story, A Local Artist<\/em>. Most of Enriquez’s horror is body horror designed to comment on the female form and the tragedy that befalls women after beauty has abandoned them. A Local Artist<\/em> pushed new ground, and was refreshing for it. In the story, a young-ish couple travel from the city of Buenos Aries to the countryside for a weekend away. Their getaway destination is a town that is trying to rescue itself from the dilapidation that onset a decade ago when the town’s trainline – it’s main link to the outside – was shut down. <\/p>\n\n\n\nTheir whimsical trip sours. The man implores his girlfriend to pay attention to the oddities of the town: many of the inhabitants seem like they haven’t aged since the train line shut down. During the small weekend market, the couple have a terrifying run in with the ‘local artist’, in which Enriquez gets so close to linking her horror with a commentary on how growing cities swallow the future of little country towns. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The set up is near perfect: the decay and weirdness of the town is perfectly contrast with the couple that want to just visit for an easy weekend and then leave. The lack of care of the couple to have a meaningful engagement with the town – and who of us hasn’t been guilty of just hanging by the pool and eating a cheese board on a long weekend away? – means that it is grossly satisfying when it looks like the couple will be forced to stay there, ageless, in order to perpetuate the town simply because no one else chooses to stay of their own free will anymore. But before she finishes that thought, Enriquez again ends the story with the protagonists just leaving the supernatural encounter, and the town, before any truly meaningful revelation can take place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Story: Julie<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The standout story in the collection is Julie<\/em>. The narrator, an Argentinean teenager, is forced to share her family house with her uncle and aunt and her deranged cousin (the titular Julie) as the family returns abroad from a failed life in America. The story is written so well. Julie insistently claims to be interacting regularly with spirits \u2013 even having sex with them \u2013 but the spirits are not the focus of the story, instead it is the deterioration of family relations that takes the foreground. We get the picture that the collapse of the family was always inevitable, and Julie\u2019s outlandish claims only expeditated the drama.<\/p>\n\n\n\nJulie herself drawn so precisely that I completely believed that she believed she was part of an ethereal underworld.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nJulie had the dark dead eyes of a rat, untameable hair always bristling, skin the colour of cardboard.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s ambiguity from the narrator about the truth of Julie\u2019s situation \u2013 in fact, the narrator doesn\u2019t really care what is true. This American cousin does not belong in her world. One way or the other, the cousin will have to leave soon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s even the fun sideplot that the uncle, Julie\u2019s dad, brags about working at Boeing in America, but is likely fabricating his importance to the company, or has even maybe been fired, because \u201cthree weeks in, they threatened not to leave: not to go back to the United States \u2013 we hadn\u2019t asked about the status of my uncle\u2019s job at Boeing , and they didn\u2019t bring it up\u201d<\/em>. Why are they staying? What is going on with Julie? What level of attachment does the narrator even feel towards her cousin, who is practically a stranger? The desire to find answers to these questions shows that this is a well-constructed short story.<\/p>\n\n\n\nMore like this please!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Enriquez (still) has Potential.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
In my review of The Dangers of Smoking in Bed<\/a> <\/em>I wrote:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\nEven though The Dangers of Smoking in Bed <\/em>didn\u2019t wow me, I am going to continue reading her. This is a collection of her early work. There are definite signs of promise here. I can see a future where I read her later works and say, \u201cah\u201d. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\nI hope we are still in the \u2018early work\u2019 phase. She\u2019s bought herself one last chance. For the third book I need to be able to say her strengths stretch beyond titles and covers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My dad owned an event hall and a party store, businesses quite unsuited to our constant misery.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1877,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews_books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1872","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1872"}],"version-history":[{"count":53,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1872\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1929,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1872\/revisions\/1929"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}