Book Review: The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez
‘Sometimes I think the crazies aren’t people, they’re not real. They’re incarnations of the city’s madness, like escape valves.’
Ghost stories aren’t about ghosts. Sometimes, they aren’t even about death. Ghost stories are usually mirrors, a reflection of who we are, and what we have become. During it’s time, Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House showed us true alienation and loneliness in a Cold War torn America. Toni Morrison’s Beloved showed us horror beyond comprehension, of state induced terror that perpetuates harm within the family unit. Time and again, ghost stories are what we tell ourselves to stay awake, because sometimes slumber is too deep, and we need to be woken up.
Mariana Enriquez’s ‘The Dangers of Smoking In Bed’ is an alarm bell, littered with errant witches, devious teenagers, hungry dogs, desperate ghosts, unflinching spirits, and women who crave…crave the disgusting, the necessary, the morbid. These twelve short stories bring us into the maelstrom of modern day Argentina, a country marred by political unrest and state condoned vanishings that have left an indelible scar on the nation. Argentina, it’s villages and cities and underpasses, become a moving entity within the stories, much like a ghost. It haunts and bends and doesn’t care necessarily about the people around it, it is blind to the pain of humanity’s suffering because it is the humans who brought it upon themselves.
The stories shock and they delight. Some are darkly comic, like the opening, ‘Angelita Unearthed’, others are sinister and take you to the deepest depths of the macabre, like ‘Meat’, and others take you to a place of fear that, for me, briefly resembles euphoria, like ‘Kids Who Come Back’. I say that, because stories are meant to make us feel something, aren’t they? And when I flipped to that final page, I looked over my shoulder out my patio glass door, and I expected someone to be there, watching me, waiting for me to look.
And that is what these stories do. They force you to look. At the garish, at the unseen of society. It makes you look at the repercussions of communities that don’t look, of people that don’t take the time to See, capitol S, what is happening to the people around them.
But, despite all this, there is also tenderness. There is caring. There is even love, in all this blood. And there is a lot of blood.
This is Enriquez's second collection, her first is our horror book club pick for October!
Buy from Book + Bottle Online: The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez $27
If You Liked This, You’ll Enjoy:
Eat the Mouth That Feeds You by Carribean Fragoza
Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz
Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russel
To Be Drunk With:
Our Guggenheim Malbec Bubbles – if you are reading Argentinian Gothic, you need an Argentinian wine, and this fits the bill. Red berries from beginning to end.