Subverting Horror Tropes: The Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enríquez
Mariana Enríquez builds an interesting horror collection while employing traditional horror tropes and grounding the tales to real-life settings and, at times, blending them with Argentine historical happenings. This aligns with Benjamin Percy’s advice: “Start with reality… then inject it with a healthy dose of imagination and think of the worst-case scenario for the characters in your story.”
By starting with reality, Enríquez manages to terrify us with her stories because they seem plausible. Quoting Megan McDowell, Enríquez’s translator, “Haunted houses and deformed children exist on the same plane as extreme poverty, drugs and criminal population.” McDowell also writes, “The stories have something of the supernatural to them, but fear comes more from police, neighborhoods, poverty, violence, and men.”
In Enríquez’s book, we encounter diverse horror tropes such as evil ghosts, cults, vampires, haunted houses, shapeshifters, mediums, madness, and a monster reminiscent of “The Swamp Thing.”
An example of Enríquez effectively subverting a trope is the story “The Inn” which revolves around the trope of “the haunted hotel.” When we typically encounter this trope, characters usually “don't have a choice. Staying in a hotel with a lockable door is much more preferable than taking their chances sleeping in the car, or maybe they don't have a car at all.” However, in this story, the protagonists willingly enter the hotel to prank the owner. But when they find themselves trapped by ghosts, they discover that in the hotel “limns a horrifying story of state terror and clandestine torture centers.”
As Percy states, “Place matters because it solidifies the otherworld we’re entering and anchors your characters in it. Never give us a generic description. When we enter a new space, show it to us — but through a particular lens: your character’s point of view, modified by mood.”
Another example of trope subversion is “Adela’s House” in which the protagonist, Clara, who comes from a lower middle-class family, becomes a false friend of her rich neighbor, Adela, who is missing an arm. At first, it seems that the title of the story, “Adela’s House,” refers to the mansion where Adela lives, alienated from the realities of the neighborhood, and beaten by Videla’s dictatorship.
But then we are introduced to an abandoned house in the neighborhood where the children decide to break in. Once inside, the house traps Adela and it becomes her true home. In the middle of the story, the reader gets a glimpse of what happens to the neighborhood after Adela’s tragedy. “Now it’s a poor and dangerous place, and the neighbors don’t go out; they’re afraid of being robbed, they’re afraid of the teenagers who drink wine on the corners and whose fights sometimes end in gunshots.” Telling the reader that the haunted house didn’t just trap Adela, it trapped the neighborhood as well.
In the story “Under the Black Water,” a district attorney named Marina encounters a cult. “The most stereotypical fictional cult — and thus the most tropeable — is a small and relatively obscure group of people, centered around a single charismatic leader, which recruits the credulous and vulnerable and brainwashes them to believe something weird. The leader is often a grifter who demands absolute loyalty and abuses their power.”
However, in the story, the cult exists in a poor neighborhood, abandoned by the police because, in this Argentine social context, the poor don’t matter. Something evil lives in the Riachuelo, and since nobody helped the people who lived there, the neighborhood’s residents tried to murder the creature by dumping toxic chemicals on the river. “Those people were being responsible when they polluted that river. They were covering something up.” The leader in this story isn’t a person who abuses their power; instead, it’s the creature that lives under the toxic Riachuelo’s water.
These examples show us that, “Enríquez’s particular genius catches us off guard by how quickly we can slip from the familiar into a new and unknown horror. Enríquez's literature appeals to ancient creeping fears that prowl our subconscious, and that, in the worst of times, are acted out on our political stage. Her work is an example of how to use tropes that work and then make them ours by grounding them in reality and layering them with social commentary.
