The less Mariana Enriquez tells you, the worse things get. For all the monsters, cannibals and ghosts in Things We Lost in the Fire, her first book to be translated into English, I think ‘Adela’s House’ is its most disturbing story – the tale of three children, two of them siblings, drawn to a mysterious house, where doors open onto impossible rooms and from which none of them will emerge unscathed, if at all. The story is full of detail, but its secret weapon is, well, keeping secrets: the titular Adela – a “suburban princess” living in an “enormous English chalet tucked into [a] grey neighbourhood” in an underprivileged part of Buenos Aires – has lost an arm, for reasons she is never quite able to explain; she and the narrator’s brother watch horror movies then relate their plots to the narrator, plots she does not relay to the reader. When the three children visit that dilapidated, creepy, buzzing house and the truly inexplicable strikes, it’s the very absence of information and comprehensibility that is so terrifying: absence with form and appetite, taking a bite from the world. Revisiting this story, I realised it’s one of the seeds of Enríquez’s maximalist horror novel Our Share of Night, forming almost an extra layer of the uncanny, a ghost story that haunts itself.
Collected in Things We Lost in the Fire, Portobello, 2017
A Personal Anthology 