A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enríquez review – gothic horror with a twist

This Argentinian short story collection is at its best when it breaks from convention All but one of the stories in A Sunny Place for Shady People – the third short-story collection from Argentinian author Mariana Enríquez to be translated into English by Megan McDowell – concern hauntings, and ghosts. In My Sad Dead, a relatively affluent suburb bordered by crime-ridden slums is tormented by the apparition of a teenage boy shot dead in a robbery. In The Suffering Woman, a makeup artist experiences visions of a stranger’s slow decline into terminal illness. In Black Eyes, three volunteers for an NGO assisting the homeless of Buenos Aires have a blood-curdling encounter with two ethereal little boys wearing lederhosen. The haunting is Enríquez’s perennial theme, and a word that, as she noted in an interview around the publication of her novel Our Share of Night, has no exact conceptual equivalent in the Spanish in which she writes. “The nearest would be ‘embrujado’,” she told the Southwest Review, “but that is bewitched. ‘Maldito’, but that implies a curse … We also use ‘encantado’, but that’s enchanted. ‘Fantasmagórico’, another word in Spanish that is near to ‘haunted’, is not exactly it either.”