A Sunny Place for Shady People

Enriquez (The Dangers of Smoking in Bed) offers a masterful collection full of grotesque body horror, red-hot terror, and mysterious events, revealing the pain and loss endured by women in modern-day Buenos Aires. In “My Sad Dead,” Emma, a doctor, is routinely visited by the ghost of her mother, who died from cancer, and the ghosts of three teenage girls who died in a recent drive-by shooting. For Emma, the apparitions amount to a veritable “ghost pandemic,” caused in part by her neighborhood’s uptick in violence, where there’s “more money in crime than in lawful work.” In “Face of Disgrace,” the narrator tells of how his mother suffered from a dreadful disorder where her facial features began disappearing years after she was raped by a faceless man, and the erasure is passed down through the generations. “Metamorphosis” portrays a perimenopausal woman lamenting her body’s transformation (“No one tells you, there’s no warning. Your skin dries out, the fat builds up on your hips and legs, and the cellulite deepens from one day to the next”). She has a fibroid removed during her hysterectomy, and later has it implanted on her spine to restore her sense of feeling complete in her body. Enriquez’s stories gain their power through surprise, as they often begin with a realistic setting before taking a terrifying or unsettling swerve, and she brilliantly explores themes of guilt, shame, and vanity. These provocative tales are first-rate literary horror. Agent: Maria Lynch, Casanovas Lynch. (Sept.)