Short Stories – Things We Lost In The Fire

This post is part of a year-long series about short stories.  Read about my “Year of the Short Story” HERE.

Things We Lost In The Fire by Mariana Enriquez (2017) – Stretching our wings some more with the first English language collection of Argentine writer Mariana Enriquez.  An award-winning author and editor based in Buenos Aires, Enriquez shows all of her storytelling talents here. The stories come with both subtle humor and a disquieting edge. Not necessarily full-on horror stories, but ones that wander along the edge of comfortable “reality” and another dimension of strangeness and fear. What feels “other worldly” to a reader in the U.S. grows out of the upheaval of Argentinian history over the last several decades. A world where people too often simply disappear.

The stories:

• The Dirty Kid – An interaction with a homeless child in a tough neighborhood
• The Inn – Two girls get more than they expect when they break into an inn as a prank
• The Intoxicated Years – Adventures along the edges of drug and alcohol transformed reality
• Adela’s House – Three children explore a haunted house
• An Invocation of the Big Eared Runt – A tour guide becomes obsessed with one of the characters on his tour
• Spiderweb – An unhappy marriage and an old woman who disappeared
• End of Term – A strange girl in class and the mystery behind it all
• No Flesh Over Our Bones – A young woman becomes obsessed with a skull
• The Neighbor’s Courtyard – What did a young woman really see next door?
• Under the Black Water – Two bodies went into the river. Something different rose out of its dark waters
• Green Red Orange – Sad people are merciless
• Things We Lost in the Fire – Women in Argentina choose a terrifying act of protest and defiance –

Another one of the top short story collections of 2017.  EnriquezShe weaves these stories beautifully, with language that is both firmly realistic and vaguely mystical. There is a magic, dark and frightening, that flickers at the edge of your awareness. That allows these stories to exist beyond any one place or time.

My favorites here are:

• “Adela’s House” – It would be easy to write this off as just a “haunted house” story.  But she manages to find another gear, one subtler than most and therefore more terrifying in its own way.
• “Spiderweb” – He’s an unbearable jerk, but does he get what he deserves?  And what exactly does he “get”?
• “Under The Black Water” – The horror is more in the waiting to discover what exactly has arisen from those waters.

All of these stories have such a deft touch to the terrifying aspects of the story.  The image that came back over and over was of the old television show “The Twilight Zone”.  Reality looks perfectly normal, except that you feel that somehow it isn’t.  That tiny tip away from safe and comforting may be the most terrifying step of them all.  And Enriquez masters it here.

Another great addition to our list!