Things We Lost in the Fire: Stories

From the first page this collection made me remember how much I love stories that are macabre, unexpected, or full of dread. These stories both seem very contemporary, and seem completely connected with the magnificent stories of the macabre of past eras--stories that I have read over and over again, like The Monkey's Paw by Saki, and The Horla by de Maupassant, and The Most Dangerous Game by Connell, and anything ever written by Poe. What is different about Enriquez's stories--startlingly, shockingly, eye-opening-ly different--is how deeply they are connected with a female perspective. Female fears. Female dreads. I say "eye-opening" because I never really understood how masculine these old stories are--not even The Most Dangerous Game show more which is about two men on an island in a life-and-death battle for survival and not a woman to be seen or heard from. I was totally captivated by these stories and delighted to have found a new author and a new contemporary voice to follow. show less

The stories in Things We Lost in the Fire are dark, unsettling and powerful. Mariana Enríquez uses horror and the uncanny to explore women's lives, from schoolgirls to grown women, some impoverished, some wealthy, most reaching for levels of independence or to carve out some space for themselves in the world.

One story tells of three friend drink and drug their way through their young years, a partying haze. Part of the beauty "The Intoxicated Years" is the breathless quality of the prose, moment rushing into moment as the girls rage through their days. At first, it seems a story of reckless freedom, but it becomes clear that all of their adventures are underpinned with a growing viscousness that's beautifully powerful and raw.

In show more "Spiderweb," a woman feels bored and trapped by the marriage she rushed into, and when she brings her husband to visit her family, she's embarrassed and repelled by him with every passing moment. One a trip with her cousin Natalia and her husband to Asunción (an open market offering mostly knockoffs or illegal items), her frustration comes to the surface. I love the way this story builds on the feeling of being stuck by the choices you've made.

"No Flesh Over Our Bones" is the story of a woman finds a human skull, rings it home and names it Vera. The woman becomes more and more obsessed with the skull, desiring to make it whole again. The story approaches the realm of body horror as it explores women's relationships to their bodies.

In "Under the Black Water," Marina is an attorney who works with the people who live in impoverished in the slums of Buenos Aires. She learns that strange things, including a dead man coming up out of the water, are happening in the slums. When Marina investigates, events grow more and more disturbing in a way that feels Lovecraftian. This is one of my favorite stories in the collection. I love the main character and how the story is both grittily realistic and strange in the ways it explores poverty and environmentalism.

Among the most disturbing and powerful stories for me was "Things We Lost in the Fire." Body horror is a key trope in this story, in which women claim their own lives and bodies by setting themselves on fire and living in the world with their scars proudly shown. The scars are presented by this movement of women as a new kind of beauty, with fearlessness and a fervor, and yet.

I'm looking forward to reading more work by Enríquez. show less

Mariana Enríquez escreve sobre uma Argentina que não conhecemos, oculta nas sobras de Buenos Aires e cidades menos conhecidas. Pessoas em situação de rua, adolescentes para quem os pais não olham com a devida atenção, gente solitária angustiada por situações incomuns, que beiram o sobrenatural. Leitura instigante, por vezes perturbadora.

‘’The gaucho is good,’’ he said. ‘’But the other one isn’t.’’
He said it in a quiet voice, looking at the candles.
‘’What other one?’’, I asked. ‘
’The skeleton’’, he said. ‘’There are skeletons back there.’’

Uncompromising women. People in the margins of their society. Citizens fighting against tyranny. Black magic. Folklore. Haunted buildings. Haunted souls. Threat and compassion. Fight and terror. Despair and persecution. Violence and disbelief. Toil and disillusionment.

In Mariana Enriquez’s world, you need to tread carefully. Once you enter her universe, there is no going back. The macabre, the raw, the real. Life is waiting for you…

The Dirty Kid: A poignant story about a dilapidated show more neighbourhood, children forsaken and lost, a brave woman and the futility of trying to help. A tale of Santa Muerte, Pomba Giro, and Gaucho Gil.

The Inn: A story about a mysterious provincial town, dark buildings and the relationship between two teenage girls. A solemn (and insolent) marriage of teenage sexuality and the terror of the State.

The Intoxicated Years: A company of teenage girls try to cope with broken families and all kinds of disappointment by consuming drugs, drugs and more drugs during the years of the daily power cuts and the deep poverty in Argentina.

‘’The house tells us the stories. You don’t hear it?’’
‘’Poor thing,’’ said Pablo. ‘’She doesn’t gear the house’s voice.’’
‘’It doesn’t matter’’, said Adela. ‘’We’ll tell her.’’
And they told me.
About the old woman, whose eyes had no pupils but who wasn’t blind.
About the old man, who burned medical books out by the empty chicken coop, in the backyard.
About the backyard, just as dry and dead as the front, full of little holes like the dens of rats.
About a faucet that never stopped dripping, because the thing that lived in the house needed water.’’

Adela’s House: A sad, haunting story about three brilliant children and a strange house. What starts as a typical ‘’haunted house’’ tale becomes a sinister cautionary tale. I loved it!

An Invocation of the Big-Eared Runt: A guide specializing in True Crime tours in Buenos Aires is suddenly haunted by Argentina’s worst serial killer, the murderer of children. The images of Orehudo’s crimes and the difficulties at home create a haunting combination. The closure will stay with you…

‘’I don’t like the word chicharra; I wish they were always called cicadas, which is only used when they’re in the larval stage. If they were called cicadas, their summer noise would remind me of the violet flowers of the jacaranda trees along the Parana or the white stone mansions with their staircases and their willows. But as it is, as chicharras, they make me remember the heat, the rotting meat, the blackouts, the drunks who stare with bloodshot eyes from their benches in the park.’’

Spiderweb: The trip to Paraguay takes a very strange turn for our sympathetic narrator, her spirited cousin and the worthless piece of mear that is actually her husband. Dictatorship, local legends, nightly dangers form an enticing mixture of the crazy and the solemn. Who weaves the web and or whom?

End of Term: A painful -literally - story of a girl who practically mutilates herself, haunted by a man and the girl who tries to help her. Dark, haunting and raw.

‘’Vera and I will be beautiful and light, nocturnal and earthly; beautiful, the crusts of earth enfolding us. Hollow, dancing skeletons. Vera and I - no flesh over our bones.’’

No Flesh Over Our Bones: A young woman becomes obsessed with an abandoned human skull.

The Neighbour’s Courtyard: A social worker whose unspeakable negligence led to disaster believes that a boy has been kidnapped and tortured by her neighbour. This story had potential but ended up being a rather dubious commentary on mental health. Not to mention that it was disgusting. There is a difference between the raw and the uncanny and the violent just for the sake of shock value. I was angry and disgusted.

‘’In his house, the dead man waits dreaming.’’

Under the Black Water: A nightmarish story of a woman who tries to find the murderer of a teenage boy, a slum city full of violence and death, and the cult of the dead. In my opinion, this was the finest moment in the collection and a powerful commentary on the violence and discrimination against the ones who live in the margins of a troubled society full of corruption and crime.

Green, Red, Orange: A story about the terrible hikikomori phenomenon, the lethal dangers of the Internet and mental health. Very poignant and acute in its honesty.

Things We Lost In the Fire: I averted my eyes from the page quite a few times while I was reading this story. Not because of disgust but because of rage and a striking feeling of despair and helplessness. When men start committing unspeakable crimes against their wives, the women decide that it is time to pay them back. Them and the society that allows this to continue. Domestic violence is seen under a raw, poignant light in the story that concludes a demanding, ‘’difficult’’ collection.

You can't sit and wait for others to defend you. They won't. You have to stand your ground and have the guts to attack (mercilessly and uncompromisingly) when your dignity is threatened. This has been my motto and my compass for 36 years and it sure as Hell won't change now!

Outstanding translation by Megan McDowell who also penned a superb Translator’s Note.

‘’Do you know the kind of foulness that reaches us here? The shit from all the houses, all the filth from the sewers, everything! Layers and layers of filth to keep it dead or asleep. It’s the same thing, I believe sleep and death are the same thing. And it worked, until people started to do the unthinkable: they swam under the black water. And they woke the thing up. Do you know what ‘Emanuel’ means? It means ‘God is with us.’ The problem is, what God are we talking about?’’

My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.wordpress.com/ show less

The twelve short stories in Things We Lost in the Fire center on narratives grounded in the more mundane horrors of modern life in Argentina until they turn macabre and supernaturally sinister. Each story is a gem of darkly creeping horror that fans of luminaries like Shirley Jackson and Kelly Link will love.

While blending horror with regular life is by no means a new concept, what elevates these stories from the rest is how seamlessly Enriquez blends the more sinister and fantastic elements of these pieces to frameworks grounded in the real world. Enriquez executes these disparate elements so well that it is sometimes hard to tell where the transition from reality to horror story begins to happen. Partly this is because she doesn't shy show more away from addressing the dark history of Argentina nor the modern problems which plague it. Instead of overshadowing the reality, Enriquez uses elements of the horror genre to stare into the dark shadows of her country and record her observations in unflinching and painfully human prose. When the supernatural and unexplained creep into these stories, they are a manifestation of the horrors of reality. This is not a collection for closure. There is no comfort here. show less

“The stench of resignation was in the air and seeped from the twisted mouths of embittered people, including the whiny parents we scorned now more than ever.”

This is an impressive collection of twelve stories, mostly set in Argentina. Many of the tales take place in impoverished areas and there is murder, self-immolation, drug use, black magic and other ghostly leanings, all told in a strong, strikingly, original voice. I like my books and stories dark, but this one continues to give me the creeps. A bold debut and I will forward to seeing what this young author does next.

"She asks if he talks to me. I tell her the truth: yes, or more like he chats—because he talks less and less, he’s disappearing into the Internet; Marco is letters that titillate, and sometimes he just disappears without waiting for an answer—but that he never tells me what’s going on, what he’s feeling, what he wants."

I tagged it horror but maybe only half the stories fit into what you'd typically call horror - most are realist with only a quick encounter with something maybe supernatural, or the intrusion of the very real horrors of real life. I came into it with the wrong expectations because of the genre tag but as I got used to it I found it compelling. Quite a few stories not only lack resolution but even a sense of what show more exactly happened - we get a dip into the other side, the terrifying stuff that underpins middle class normality, but we only get to see the horror from the edges. There are very obvious constant reoccurring themes - great poverty and slums, the class divide, the legacy of the dictatorships (including Paraguay), the oppression of women (all of these stories are told from the perspective of women). Even when the themes are obvious and the "horror" level isn't that strong, all the stories are properly creepy and stick with you. It brings up your uneasiness around the things you can't quite see, that are bred from capitalism and the patriarchy and have to be suppressed and fenced out in case they take you. Great writing. show less