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Los peligros de fumar en la cama
368 pages
A visceral, dread-soaked descent into the macabre where urban decay and supernatural horrors bleed seamlessly into one another.
What it feels like
Reading this collection feels like walking alone down a poorly lit city street where the shadows seem to detach themselves from the walls. It is a propulsive, dread-soaked experience that masterfully blurs the line between gritty urban realism and supernatural terror. The prose is sharp and unflinching, delivering visceral shocks with a matter-of-fact delivery that makes the macabre feel terrifyingly mundane. You are constantly kept off-balance, navigating a claustrophobic atmosphere thick with historical trauma, adolescent obsession, and the abject realities of the female body. It delights readers who crave literary horror with a sociopolitical bite, specifically those who want to be unsettled, provoked, and left with a lingering sense of unease long after the final page is turned.
- Mood
- dread-soaked
- claustrophobic
- gritty
- eerie
- Tone
- unflinching
- macabre
- matter-of-fact
- subversive
- Pace
- propulsive
- Themes
- female bodily autonomy · urban decay · historical trauma · adolescent obsession · social inequality
- The writing
- Sharp, unadorned, and brutally precise, grounding supernatural horrors in gritty, everyday realism.
- The arc
- Plunges the reader into a state of creeping unease that escalates into visceral shock, leaving a lingering, haunted resonance.
- Who it's for
- Fans of literary horror and dark, socially conscious fiction who appreciate visceral imagery and unapologetically monstrous women.
Content notes
- body horror
- child death
- self-harm
- animal cruelty
- gore
- sexual violence
About the book
Following the "propulsive and mesmerizing" (New York Times Book Review) Things We Lost in the Fire comes a new collection of singularly unsettling stories, by an Argentine author who has earned comparisons to Shirley Jackson and Jorge Luis Borges. Mariana Enriquez has been critically lauded for her unconventional and sociopolitical stories of the macabre: populated by unruly teenagers, crooked witches, homeless ghosts, and hungry women, they walk the uneasy line between urban realism and horror. The stories in her next collection are as terrifying as they are socially conscious, and press into being the unspoken -- fetish, illness, the female body, the darkness of human history -- with unsettling urgency. A woman is sexually obsessed with the human heart; a lost, rotting baby crawls out of a backyard and into a bedroom; a pair of teenage girls can't let go of their idol; an entire neighborhood is cursed to death by a question of morality they fail to answer correctly.Written against the backdrop of contemporary Argentina, and with resounding tenderness towards those in pain, in fear, and in limbo, this new collection from one of Argentina's most exciting writers finds Enriquez at her most sophisticated, and most chilling.
Description from Open Library.
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