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A review by ghostboyreads
A Sunny Place for Shady People: Stories by Mariana Enríquez
4.0
"And the hyenas started to sing. There's no other way to describe it. They laughed and howled, but their chorus held a certain aesthetic sense, horrible and funereal: the anticipation of an infernal pack of hounds tasked with preventing our escape and enjoying their task deliriously."
It is, at this point, an undisputable fact that Mariana Enriquez knows how to write horror, she's the master of the short story collection. Often times writing in a strikingly empathetic and oppressively bleak manner, Enriquez presents us with something so very sad and so incredibly haunting with this novel. A Sunny Place for Shady People gives a voice to the overlooked and marginalized voices, it twists the seemingly mundane and average into something foul, something feral, something fucking horrible. This collection focuses heavily on real world horrors that are tinged with a hint of the supernatural, and its strong suit is the grotesque, gruesome and gnarly body horror that's present throughout.
Something really wonderful about this collection is that it makes Buenos Aires feel alive, all of these stories feel so refreshing, so different and interesting from the slew of US and UK centric horror, Enriquez always delivers an interesting perspective, but it's with A Sunny Place for Shady People that it's so much more distinctive. These are some weird stories, they feel extremely surreal and abstract, they're stories of subtlety and vagueness - oftentimes with very open endings, too. Despite the hazy obscurity of these tales, there's a whole heaping of violence, some really brutal, disturbing and vile scenes that're told with a disgusting clarity. It's some real brilliant stuff.
It is, at this point, an undisputable fact that Mariana Enriquez knows how to write horror, she's the master of the short story collection. Often times writing in a strikingly empathetic and oppressively bleak manner, Enriquez presents us with something so very sad and so incredibly haunting with this novel. A Sunny Place for Shady People gives a voice to the overlooked and marginalized voices, it twists the seemingly mundane and average into something foul, something feral, something fucking horrible. This collection focuses heavily on real world horrors that are tinged with a hint of the supernatural, and its strong suit is the grotesque, gruesome and gnarly body horror that's present throughout.
Something really wonderful about this collection is that it makes Buenos Aires feel alive, all of these stories feel so refreshing, so different and interesting from the slew of US and UK centric horror, Enriquez always delivers an interesting perspective, but it's with A Sunny Place for Shady People that it's so much more distinctive. These are some weird stories, they feel extremely surreal and abstract, they're stories of subtlety and vagueness - oftentimes with very open endings, too. Despite the hazy obscurity of these tales, there's a whole heaping of violence, some really brutal, disturbing and vile scenes that're told with a disgusting clarity. It's some real brilliant stuff.
"I understood that if he was crying with me there beside him, it was because what he felt was unbearable. He drove so fast that I was scared the car would break down, that a tire would fall off. I was scared of anything that would leave us stranded near that sad house in the southern suburbs, with the desolation that the black-eyed children had left behind, with what remained of Flora and her dying brother dripping down the walls of their house."
By now, it should come as no surprise that I am a massive fan of Enriquez's writing, and despite the fact that, none of these short story collections can come close to the brilliance that was Our Share Of Night, all of them are still incredible pieces of horror literature, and A Sunny Place for Shady People is no exception. There's just something so otherworldly about how these stories worm their way into your brain, there's something so intense and intimate about the way in which they consume you. They're all quiet, and somber, the kind of horror that simmers away in the background, waiting for its chance to ruin us. Bizarre, yet terrifying, highly arresting and deeply affecting, A Sunny Place for Shady People is a fantastic collection that casts its light upon the overlooked and underappreciated.
"The ghost girls ran in desperate circles, and their wailing was truly terrifying. Their confused desperation. Had they only just realized that they were dead? How unfair: usually the dead have the good fortune not to see themselves decompose, even when they return as ghosts."