‘The Cart’ by Mariana Enriquez, trans. Megan McDowell

‘The Cart’ is an evocative morality tale, which also illustrates the way many people currently live only a touch of bad luck away from absolute poverty. Like many of the stories in this Personal Anthology, it balances absolute, highly detailed reality with an element which is a bit weird.

Two drunks get into a fight in a working-class Argentinian suburb. The outsider is humiliated then forced to abandon his shopping cart full of “bottles, cardboard, and phone books.” A couple of weeks later, bad things start happening in that street. People get ill, are arrested, disappear. The local drunk claims this means the shopping cart is cursed.

“After two months no one in the neighbourhood had a phone anymore – they couldn’t afford it. After three months, they had to tap the electricity wires because they couldn’t pay their bills.”

Enriquez builds a community of interesting people through cumulative specifics, then goes on to destroy almost every one of them in individual, contemporary ways. Only one household is secretly safe. The subtlety of the writing is such that it is never made clear whether there is a supernatural factor, or just a coincidence of ill fortunes.

“The taxi driver ventured on foot to the other side of the avenue. There, he said, everything was fine as could be.”

Collected in Los Peligros de Fumar en la Cama, Editorial Anagrama, 2017. First published in English in The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, Granta Books, 2022

‘Our Lady of the Quarry’ by Mariana Enríquez, tr. Megan McDowell

This story is unusual in that it’s told in the first-person plural: we. A group of teenage girls hang out with a slightly older girl, Sylvia, whom they both admire and hate. “If we discovered a new drug she had already overdosed on the same substance. If we discovered a band we liked, she had already got over her fandom of the same group.” When Sylvia takes up with a young man they all fancy it becomes a horror story, a kind of Argentine Carrie. Enríquez is brilliant at evoking the inchoate power of adolescent female sexuality.

First published in English in The New Yorker, December 2020, available to read here. Collected in the UK in The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, Granta 2021

‘Our Lady of the Quarry’ by Mariana Enríquez, translated by Megan McDowell

Mariana Enríquez understands the power of teenage girls, and this story is a bleak testament to that power. Told in the collective first person, ‘Our Lady of the Quarry’ chronicles a group of them who go to great lengths to win the attention of an older boy they have a crush on. When their wiles fail to attract him and he begins to date an older friend of theirs, things turn ugly. Like all great horror stories, ‘Our Lady’ starts off in an ordinary fashion with relatively run-of-the mill bitchiness from our jealous narrators. Slowly, however, bits of their feral nature are revealed. ‘Our Lady’ is a sparkling example of how teen obsession can quickly topple over into violence; how a perfect sunny day swimming at the quarry can become a sweaty, heat-drenched nightmare.

First published in The New Yorker, December 2020, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, Hogarth, 2021

‘Adela’s House’ by Mariana Enríquez, translated by Megan McDowell

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