A short life of the author
Mariana Enriquez (b. 1973, Buenos Aires) is an Argentine journalist and fiction writer who has become the most important horror writer in Latin America — and, arguably, the most important writer of supernatural short fiction anywhere in the world. Her stories draw on the Gothic traditions of Poe, Shirley Jackson, and the Argentine master Silvina Ocampo, but they are rooted in a specifically Argentine reality: the disappeared of the Dirty War, the street children who haunt Buenos Aires, the economic collapse of 2001, the violence and inequality that persist beneath the surface of a seemingly modern nation.
Life and Career
Enriquez was born in Buenos Aires and studied journalism and communications at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata. She works as the deputy editor of the literary supplement of Página/12, one of Argentina’s major newspapers — a day job that keeps her embedded in Argentine politics and culture and that feeds the documentary precision of her fiction.
She published her first novel, Bajar es lo peor (1995), at twenty-two, a dark, drug-fuelled narrative about Buenos Aires nightlife that drew comparisons to the transgressive fiction of Dennis Cooper and Bret Easton Ellis. But it was her short fiction that would establish her international reputation. Los peligros de fumar en la cama (The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, 2009, English translation 2020) — her first major story collection — and Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego (Things We Lost in the Fire, 2016) are masterworks of the form.
The Story Collections
The stories in Things We Lost in the Fire and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed operate at the intersection of social realism and the supernatural. In “The Dirty Kid,” the narrator becomes obsessed with a homeless boy who lives under a bridge near her apartment — his fate connects to the hundreds of street children who vanish in Buenos Aires every year. In “Under the Black Water,” a group of believers gathers at a polluted river where something has begun to emerge from the contaminated water. In “Things We Lost in the Fire” — the title story — women in Buenos Aires begin setting themselves on fire to preempt domestic violence, turning their own immolation into a form of political protest.
What distinguishes Enriquez from other horror writers is the specificity of her social engagement. The ghosts in her stories are not generic spectres — they are the ghosts of Argentina’s Dirty War (1976–1983), when the military junta kidnapped, tortured, and murdered an estimated 30,000 people. The horror is not metaphorical: the disappeared are literally still disappearing, and the supernatural forces in Enriquez’s fiction are extensions of a political violence that has never been fully reckoned with.
Her prose style — translated with great skill by Megan McDowell — is direct, propulsive, and unsentimental. She does not build suspense through Gothic atmosphere but through accumulating details of poverty, neglect, and violence until the supernatural irruption feels not shocking but inevitable.
Our Share of Night (2019)
Nuestra parte de noche (Our Share of Night, 2019, English translation 2023) is Enriquez’s most ambitious work — a seven-hundred-page novel that spans decades of Argentine history, from the Dirty War to the present, through the story of a father and son entangled with a secret society called the Order of the Shadow. The father, Juan Peterson, is a “medium” who can open a portal to an entity called the Darkness, an act that is physically devastating and that the Order exploits for its own power. The novel follows Juan’s attempt to protect his son, Gaspar, from the Order’s plans while navigating the violence of the dictatorship, the aftermath of the Falklands War, and the ongoing corruption of Argentine society.
The novel combines horror — genuinely terrifying scenes of possession, mutilation, and contact with the Darkness — with a detailed political history of Argentina and a tender, psychologically complex portrait of a father-son relationship. It won the Premio Herralde de Novela (one of the most prestigious awards in Spanish-language literature) and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize.
Themes and Critical Standing
Enriquez’s central argument — implicit in every story, explicit in Our Share of Night — is that the supernatural is not separate from political reality but continuous with it. The Dirty War did not end in 1983; its violence persists in the disappeared who are still missing, the children who were stolen, the trauma that was never acknowledged. Horror, in Enriquez’s hands, is not escapism but the only honest mode for confronting a reality that exceeds the capacity of realism to represent it.
She has been compared to Shirley Jackson (for her mastery of short-form horror), to Silvina Ocampo (for the Argentine Gothic tradition), and to Roberto Bolaño (for the political scope of Our Share of Night). She is one of the writers who has made Latin American horror a globally recognised literary mode, and her influence on younger writers — in Latin America, Spain, and the English-speaking world — is already substantial.
Key Works
- Things We Lost in the Fire (2016)
- The Dangers of Smoking in Bed (2009/2020)
- Our Share of Night (2019) — Premio Herralde
Collecting Enriquez
Spanish originals — published by Anagrama (Barcelona) — are the true firsts and bring $15–$40. English translations are published by Granta (UK) and Hogarth (US); first editions bring $15–$30. Our Share of Night (Hogarth, 2023) first English edition brings $20–$40. Enriquez signs at Latin American literary festivals and international events (Edinburgh, Hay-on-Wye). Her profile is growing rapidly in the English-speaking world, and early editions of the story collections — particularly the Anagrama originals — are undervalued.