Things We Lost in the Fire

Enriquez is an Argentine journalist who covers the crime beat in Buenos Aires and writes horror stories about what she finds there. The twelve stories in this collection are set in contemporary Argentina — in the villas miserias, the abandoned houses, the streets where children live, the religious ceremonies, the neighborhoods still haunted by the disappeared — and use horror to name what Argentine society refuses to acknowledge directly. A woman whose face was burned off in a domestic violence attack becomes part of a movement of women who burn their own faces in solidarity. The ghost of a disappeared activist occupies a house. A child found in a trash heap becomes something that cannot be explained by social work. Enriquez is doing what the best horror always does: rendering in the register of terror the actual conditions that produce terror, without aestheticizing or domesticating them. The most important Argentine fiction since Cortázar and the book that most completely shows what social horror looks like when the social conditions are themselves horrifying.