Review: "Things We Lost in the Fire" by Mariana Enriquez

Things We Lost in the Fire, the English language debut of Argentinean Mariana Enriquez is the most powerful short story collection I have read all year. Written with anger, intensity and a love for the macabre that recalls writers and storytellers as varied as Roberto Bolano and Rod Serling, each of these stories is a perfect exercise in profound creepiness, giving the reader some very disquieting set pieces while sneaking in a little social and political subtext that is noticeable but not overbearing. While Bolano might seem like an easy and slightly unfair comparison, since they are both Latin American writers, the comparison fits very well, with the scenes of violence and cruelty here recalling some of the most harrowing works of what is arguably the Chilean writer’s masterpiece 2666. Enriquez is very aware of the history of her country and the everyday degradation she uses as the basis for most of them is rendered rather appropriately: the story she tells and what inspired them is essentially a horror story as scary as anything you can imagine. With the exception of maybe one story here (thankfully, it is also the shortest), all of these in this slightly less than 200 page book is a total knockout and will make you want to leave the lights on when you go to sleep at night. The book starts off strong with “The Dirty Kid”, where a lonely woman moves into her Grandma’s old house only to become obsessed with the homeless duo, made up of a crack addict mom and a unwashed young boy,  living across the street on a bare mattress. At one point, the boy knocks on the woman’s door and the woman takes the boy out for ice cream, only to have the mom threaten her when they get back. Soon after, the boy disappears, and the dead body of young boy is found ritually murdered and dismembered in a nearby park. It doesn’t follow the path you think it would, and the lasting image, conjured brilliantly by Enriquez in the final few pages, is the stuff nightmares are made of. You begin to see a pattern here in the stories, of people whose broken lives and unmet potential manifest themselves in grotesque and supernatural ways. For instance, the shame felt by the young girl at the center of “The Inn” of her burgeoning homosexuality and her sister’s promiscuity take the form of ghosts haunting an upscale resort hotel. The strange events leading to a disappearance in “Spiderwebs” might be the reaction the central female has with her rather belligerent and dense husband. The theme of strained marriages also permeate this collection, like the truly creepy “An Invocation of the Big-Eared Runt”, where a male tour guide sees vision of Argentina’s most horrific serial killer while his wife suffers from post-partum depression and “The Neighbor’s Courtyard” where a woman recently fired from her job and estranged from her brutally pragmatic husband begins seeing a boy chained up in the neighbor’s front yard, another story with a nightmarish conclusion. These are strong brave stories (including the title story, which, might be a critique of radical feminism) that ring true with lived experiences, filtered through a disquieting lens of graphic disturbing horror. 
Rating: 5/5