Interview by Paul Salfen
In “Adela’s House,” a brother and sister enter a derelict house, along with their neighbor, Adela. The house quickly proves to be nightmarish, possessed with its own terrible life force; once inside Adela is never seen again. While the plot summary of “Adela’s House” might sound like a conventional haunted house tale, Mariana Enríquez is after something far more charged. In her translator’s note, Megan McDowell writes that “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 … most of Mariana’s characters exist in a border space between the comfortable here and a vulnerable there; this latter could be a violent slum or a mysteriously living house, but it operates according to an unknown and sinister rationale, and it is frighteningly near.” In Enríquez’s hands, the house at the center of “Adela’s House” is a conduit for exploring both individual and collective trauma, for showing us just how close at hand the ghosts of the past are.
Mariana Enríquez is an Argentine journalist, novelist, and short story writer. She is a part of the group of writers known as “new Argentine narrative”. Her short stories fall within the horror and gothic genres and have been published in international magazines such as Granta, Electric Literature, Asymptote, McSweeney’s, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The New Yorker.
First Word on Horror is a fifteen-part documentary series that profiles five of the finest horror writers working today. Across multiple episodes, each author discusses their life, their inspirations, their philosophies, and their writing techniques while reading one of their short stories. As fact and fiction blend, secrets are revealed and the delicate alchemy that turns human experience into creative expression begins to emerge. The series is a love letter to writers of all ilk, to the primacy of the human experience, and to the simple act of reading a damned good story.
