‘It was the terror that came from the cold of the grave … a glimpse beyond the walls of sleep.’ To step into Mariana Enriquez’s vision of Argentina is to step into a world of chilling strangeness and abject terror, a world of spectral torturers and blood-soaked dresses, where the weight of history lingers like a curse and there is always something to fear in the darkness. It is a world she has carefully cultivated across two short-story collections and a novel, and her newest work, A Sunny Place for Shady People, represents both a fantastic consolidation of her craft and a thrilling exploration of new territory, newly frayed edges with which she weaves her masterful horror.

For the uninitiated, this collection perfectly showcases the breadth and depth of Enriquez’s writing, leading the reader from ghostly echoes of Argentina’s dictatorial past to inexplicable cults of the marginalised and dispossessed. They are tales of unease, paranoia and transformation which wield emotion like a knife, just as often producing moments of quietly haunting beauty as they do images of total horror. In that way, they are first and foremost tales of humanity and what lies within us, what we are capable of.

For those familiar with Enriquez’s work, then, what A Sunny Place for Shady People offers is an exciting intensification of those effects, twisting that knife ever deeper. Her protagonists have always been outsiders and loners, but here their isolation has intensified: haunted, misanthropic, ripe for destruction. Equally invigorated are the sources and subjects of her horror which have been moulded into bolder, unexpected forms. Nowhere is this clearer than in the title story, which builds a poignant narrative of mourning from seemingly disparate pieces: a puma lost in the Hollywood hills, midnight communion with an urban legend and a lover lost to their mania. Here, as in all of Enriquez’s stories, eventually the details fade away and the reader is transported to a universe stripped to its barest essentials: fear, dread and sorrow.