A Sunny Place for Shady People: Stories
“Mariana Enriquez’s wild imagination, narrative mastery, and compassion for her haunted characters make A Sunny Place for Shady People consistently engrossing.”
In Argentine author Mariana Enriquez’s new short story collection, A Sunny Place for Shady People, the uncanny invades the daily lives of her characters, turning quotidian reality into nightmares. The dozen tales, mostly set in the author’s homeland, with mainly women protagonists, immerse the reader in Argentine history, in which the past, as William Faulkner famously observed, is never dead and not even past.
Military dictatorship, political instability, economic crisis, xenophobia and racism, machismo and misogyny continue to haunt the present. These malevolent forces have supernatural manifestations that are all the more terrifying for having emerged from the stuff of daily life.
In the first story, “My Sad Dead,” the narrator encounters the ghosts of young victims of violent crime. Three teenage girls shot to death by gang-bangers while on their way home from a party return as ghosts who “seem like living girls doing the things that fifteen-year-olds do.” Except that when they look at the photos they’ve taken with their phones, they see themselves as corpses and realize that they are dead. The ghost girls then run “in desperate circles, and their wailing was truly terrifying.”
A 16-year-old boy “with an Italian last name” who was kidnapped and murdered returns to knock on the doors of neighborhood residents who refused to open their doors to him when he was fleeing his kidnappers. As he goes from house to house, banging on doors and begging to be let in, he realizes that no one will help him and that he “was surrounded by hoodless executioners hiding being the façade of a middle-class, respectable neighborhood.”
The restless, angry specter is frightening, but the indifference and apathy of neighbors who could have saved his life but refused to get involved is even more disturbing.
In the title story, set in Los Angeles, a cult waits for messages from a dead teenage girl whose body was found in a hotel’s water tank. “Hyena Hymns” evokes Argentina’s history of military dictatorship and its tortured and “disappeared” victims. Two young gay men exploring an abandoned mansion where political prisoners were held encounter the ghost of a military torturer who mutilates his own corpse.
In “Different Colors Made of Tears,” a young woman who works in a Buenos Aires vintage clothing shop visits a rich widower who wants to sell his dead wife’s clothing and jewelry. The dresses, by famous designers, are “works of art,” but when she and her co-workers try them on in the shop, their flesh is afflicted with ghastly injuries—bruises, gaping wounds, cuts, and mutilations. When they take off the dresses, their bodies return to normal.
The old man who sold them the dresses sends an email in which he reveals his monstrous nature. He calls them “whores,” like his late wife, who had an affair with a doctor and “rejected my gifts like she rejected me.” He didn’t kill his wife, but he inscribed his murderous rage into her dresses—“it’s all in those dresses . . . fabrics with all the PAIN that hussy should have felt.” The misogynist rage and abuse he inflicted on his wife get passed on to younger generations of women who receive the ”gifts” he gave her.
Body horror figures in several other stories in which female narrators experience bizarre physical transformations, mostly but not always unwanted. In “Face of Disgrace,” a woman who was raped as a young girl by a man who had no face literally loses her face, goes mad, and commits suicide.
She passes the trauma of her violation to her daughter, who learns that her grandmother also had been raped by the faceless man and lost her face. The daughter fears her own child will suffer the same fate of erasure unless she knows the suppressed story “of the faceless women of her family.”
In “Night Birds,” two sisters living with their grandmother in an isolated mansion experience “the power of metamorphosis” in different ways. Julie, mentally ill and a former psychiatric patient, fears she will be transformed into a bird. In the sisters’ river town, “all the birds that fly, drink, perch on benches, and disturb siestas with the demonic squawking of the possessed” once were women.
Her sister, who tells the story, is undergoing a different transformation. Her skin is rotting “as if I were dead.” Maggots cling to her lip, and her right eye “is totally black,” like that of a beetle or one of the bird women. At the story’s conclusion, the narrator is alone, waiting for her departed sister to return from Buenos Aires, convinced that when she does, “she’ll be a bird that’s never been seen before.”
In the aptly, if obviously, titled “Metamorphosis,” a woman experiencing the early stages of menopause has an enormous fibroid tumor removed. Rather than having it discarded as medical waste, she, finding it beautiful, takes the tumor home. Although it is no longer in her body, she can’t bear to be separated from it. She finds a body modification artist who does “reptilian implants.” He creates for her a new spine in which he puts pieces of the fibroid. She’s overjoyed by the “dragon-like” profile of her back: “For the first time I understood what it means to love your own body.”
No matter how outlandish or horrible the tale, Mariana Enriquez’s wild imagination, narrative mastery, and compassion for her haunted characters make A Sunny Place for Shady People consistently engrossing. Enriquez’s stories (expertly translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell) of everyday life turned uncanny and terrifying illustrate how horror, when practiced by an author as gifted as she, not only can be literary art but a genre that touches our deepest anxieties about life’s mysteries, the inescapability of death, and what it is to be human.