The Dangers of Smoking in Bed
SynopsisPlot
Mariana Enriquez has been critically lauded for her unconventional and sociopolitical stories of the macabre. Populated by unruly teenagers, crooked witches, homeless ghosts, and hungry women, they walk the uneasy line between urban realism and horror. The stories in her new collection are as terrifying as they are socially conscious and press into being the unspoken—fetish, illness, the female body, the darkness of human history—with bracing urgency. A woman is sexually obsessed with the human heart; a lost, the rotting baby crawls out of a backyard and into a bedroom; a pair of teenage girls can’t let go of their idol; an entire neighborhood is cursed to death when it fails to respond correctly to a moral dilemma.
Story
About this book
Mariana Enriquez is an Argentine writer known for short fiction that sits between urban realism and horror. The Dangers of Smoking in Bed gathers stories set against contemporary Argentina, populated by figures on the edges of ordinary life: restless teenagers, ghosts without shelter, crooked witches, and women driven by obsession or hunger. Two teenage girls cannot let go of their idol.
The stories move through subjects often left unspoken, including illness, fetish, the female body, and the darker threads of human history. Enriquez treats these directly rather than as spectacle, grounding supernatural or grotesque events in recognizable social settings. Horror here tends to grow from real conditions such as poverty and neglect rather than arriving from nowhere. One story turns on a whole neighbourhood cursed after failing to answer a moral question correctly.
Critics have compared Enriquez to Shirley Jackson and Jorge Luis Borges, and this collection follows her earlier book Things We Lost in the Fire. Alongside the frightening material runs a steady attention to people in pain, in fear, or in an unresolved state, which keeps these stories close to the social texture of the country they come from.
