The reader suspects that it’s too good to be true, and so it proves: Talk about the ghosts of the past is usually metaphorical, but when you start to hear banging on doors and the deafening sound of marching feet, it’s another matter entirely.Ī more oblique look at the terrors of the past is to be found in ‘The Neighbor’s Courtyard’, in which a young couple move into a lovely new house. This one sees two teenage girls playing a midnight prank in a hotel that used to be a police academy. While the actual events of the dictatorship are usually implicit rather than explicit, one story that does refer to these years is ‘The Inn’. Her characters occupy an Argentina scarred by the Dirty Wars of the 1970s and ’80s… Haunted houses and deformed children exist on the same plane as extreme poverty, drugs and criminal pollution. What there is of gothic horror in the stories in Things We Lost in the Fire mingles with and is intensified by their sharp social criticism. There’s a nice link here between the dark nature of the stories and the country’s turbulent past, and in her short translator’s note, McDowell confirms the connection: Here Enriquez creates a terrifying scenario where reality is suspended and the crimes the Argentinean authorities have committed rise up to take revenge. Even more brutal is ‘Under the Black Water’, a story that blends an investigation into police brutality with the reality of pollution and fear of the unknown. One of the clearest examples of the horror genre is ‘Adela’s House’, which sees three kids fascinated by a spooky old house pluck up the courage to go inside. There’s a dark eerie thread running throughout the collection, and while it’s usually bubbling under the surface, it occasionally bursts out into plain view. Understandable, perhaps, but is it normal to see the murderer on his bus, getting closer to the front day by day? As the story progresses, we sense that an innocent obsession is on the verge of becoming something far more sinister.

Here we follow a tour guide as he shows people around scenes of crime in the capital, and while there are a fair few to choose from, there’s one particular criminal who captures his interest more than most. There’s murder of a different kind on offer in ‘An Invocation of the Big-Eared Runt’. When she comes home one day to find the police investigating a murder, she can’t help but wonder if he’s the victim, particularly as there’s no sign of him – or his drug-addict mother. In ‘The Dirty Kid’, a middle-class woman slumming it in a dangerous part of town encounters a boy living on the streets. Several pieces show us just how hazardous life in the capital can be. In Enriquez’s hands, Buenos Aires becomes a pulsating, living entity, a place where people can be chewed up and spat out after any false step, with danger lurking around every corner. While Enriquez occasionally takes us outside Buenos Aires, with one piece set in the humid north and another in a holiday town on the coast, most unfold in the capital. Mariana Enriquez’s Things We Lost in the Fire (review copy courtesy of Portobello Books) is a collection of twelve excellent stories set in the writer’s home country. Luckily, it seems that it’s not just the translator who’s done a good job as there’s been a lot of positive coverage of the book – and now that I’ve finally got around to trying it, I can only agree. Megan McDowell has been responsible for the English version of many books I’ve read (a quick look at her website shows I’d tried nine of the thirteen titles listed – and one that hasn’t made it there yet!), so when I heard of her bringing a new Argentinean voice into English, I was immediately interested. It’s rare that I become aware of my books because of the translator, rather than the writer, but that’s the case with today’s choice.

Things we lost in the storm