A short story collection is a lot like an album: each track should stand alone, but together a mood emerges. When your collections have merited the literary fanfare that Mariana Enriquez’s short stories have garnered, there exists (in certain circles) a similar swell of anticipation as elicited by the news of a certain band’s reunion. Mariana Enriquez’s third short story collection to be translated, A Sunny Place for Shady People, contains much of what readers have come to expect from the Argentine author, namely bleak, often brutal horror. Her dark stories vary from eerie hauntings to brusque violence that is seemingly inevitable in a state which cares little for its citizens, alongside the mundane settings that form Enriquez’s terrain.
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However, like a third album, her third story collection often leaves us wanting. It seems as if ideas that didn’t make the first or second collection have been dusted off for the third. Although Enriquez’s ability to conjure uniquely terrifying images remains, the stories themselves feel simultaneously bloated and incomplete. A jumble of ideas where the titular concept of the story is discarded only a few pages in. While Enriquez has never played by conventional rules, it seems as if her penchant for subversion should have some limits.
For fans there are still gems to be mined. Favourites that play on repeat in my head include: My Sad Dead, A Sunny Place for Shady People and The Suffering Woman. The collection may not be everything readers hoped for but what remains is Enriquez’s originality and powerful political voice.
A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enriquez is out on 26 September (Granta, £14.99). You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.
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