A city billboard from the usual music-event columns announces Argentine author Mariana Enriquez touring Spain, portrayed like a rock star. The promotional wink hits the mark: her novel Nuestra Parte de Noche propelled her from a small, fiercely loyal fan club into a wide cult figure, drawing both hardcore horror readers and those seeking more literary intensity.
One could say that following that massive novel is no easy feat, yet Enriquez, stubborn as ever, faced the challenge. The result is a new collection of stories, Un lugar soleado para gente sombría (Anagrama), where she maps a broad geography of her favorite terrors, giving special place to her beloved ghosts. Buenos Aires, above all, feels like a city of ghosts or the disappeared, and this book may hold more lost souls than any other in her work.
During a visit to Barcelona, the author notes the evolution in her approach to the genre since her twenties when horror fueled her early stories, through to the fifties she inhabits now. As she grows, new fears emerge. The book, featuring people of all ages, becomes a lens to examine adult fears anew. Thus, the ghosts here represent guilt, recurrence, and trauma tied to the end of life.
La profeta
Persistent themes of poverty and harsh economic realities of the country appear in the margins of Buenos Aires and the desolate inland towns. Read in light, or perhaps in shadow, of the rise to power of Javier Milei, they acquire a prophetic quality. If Kafka’s fantasies point to Hitler, Enriquez’s nightmares seem to map a new political-terror reality.
“Milei is not some alien,” she explains, “there was a dangerous, simmering fatigue among citizens that traditional politics failed to contain or refused to address. That opened space for people with limited information to decide differently. I sensed that atmosphere of desperation, even if I disagreed with the outcome.”
Stephen King and Carrie
As always, Stephen King appears as a foundational figure in her work. She credits him with reshaping how fear is understood, moving away from Poe or Lovecraft to a fear grounded in reality: violence and true crime. “He says, referring to Carrie, his masterwork, that fear lives in a school where a bullied girl unleashes deadly power. If she had a weapon, it would resemble the frequent school shootings in the United States. He takes real terrors of culture and country and feeds them into fiction. That opened a door for my generation to question fears and channel them into storytelling.”
True Detective
She also acknowledges the influence of Thomas Ligotti, a craftsman of metaphysical horror who is not widely known. It’s notable that much of the intricate, cathartic dialogue in the first season of True Detective appears to be drawn from Ligotti’s La conspiración contra la especie humana. “Ligotti probes what we call real and what lies behind it. What if reality is a simulation, a place whose rules changed? That kind of fear, very current, now fuels popular culture through shows like Black Mirror.”
The author’s approach is well known: transform personal and dark memories of the military dictatorship into narratives. In her homeland, the past remains frightening not because it repeats itself but because unresolved issues linger. Beyond political resolutions and legal trials, debates about the number of victims persist. The fear at the core also lies in family secrets and personal mistakes that echo into the present. Faulkner reminded that the past never passes; it stays, always present. That persistence is what creates a ghost that emerges to demand resolution for what was done to it.
Walking Buenos Aires
Across Buenos Aires streets, placards mark the last sightings of the disappeared, memories Enriquez has revisited since childhood. She recognizes she works with memory, and people respond with gratitude. They do not recall things sugar-coated but as stories that chill the blood. There is simply no other way to bear it.