Reviews with content warning for Violence - Things We Lost in the Fire

A creepy collection of stories that are unsettling, sometimes disgusting, and always, always vivid. Every story goes to a different part of Argentina and explores a different version of life at its margins.

Most of the stories have a gothic feel to them and the prose (at least in Spanish) managed to describe my home country in a way that felt both familiar and alien. Comforting and disturbing. The author knows exactly how to latch on to the shadows we tend to look over, and make them deeper, darker, impossible to ignore.

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chiaralzr's review against another edition

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challenging dark reflective sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

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linnkaren's review against another edition

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dark mysterious sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

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mackenzi's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious reflective sad medium-paced

Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

Reading this book was like the author taking me into a little apartment and sitting me down on a couch or at an intimate little table. She brings in a box, an old shoebox or a little decorative wooden box, and opens it up and it's full of time-faded photographs and polaroids. She takes them out one by one, tells me the name of the person in it as she looks at the dates and little notes written on them in all sorts of different handwritings. 1979, 1991, 1983, 1999- I try to imagine what each year might mean but it's hard for me to imagine a place I don't know well during a time I didn't exist yet. It's a thrill to get to peek in at these lives I'd have never otherwise known, but none of the people in the photos seem happy, and I'm filled with apprehension.

She tells me a story about each photo, a story she heard from a friend or a grandparent. Some of the names are the same from photograph to photograph, and I wonder if they're ever the same people displaced a little by time, still finding their way into stranger's photos just to be lost again. The stories are all a little sad, melancholic for their world-weariness, and all are frightening. Some scare me because ghosts scare me like they scare a child, some are scary because the world is just that way and I feel helpless about it.

Each story ends, abruptly, her voice fading into silence as she sets the photo on the table, making a little pile that she's already gone through. I ask what happened to the person, what happened next, and she shrugs, she doesn't know. So each story lingers, because my mind craves completion, resolution- but if you've ever stumbled onto old photos in an antique store, you know there's no resolution. You can stare at the faces in the pictures all day and never know who they really were. And each story haunts because there seems like a world of things in that story, and I want to sift through each one to try and find the meaning, the lesson, the history, the knowledge of someone who might have lived it for real.

But they're still just photographs and eventually she runs out of them, and she's putting them back in the box and she's taking the box away again, and I'm left with a handful of memories that feel startlingly real.

Content Warnings

curiousreader's review against another edition

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challenging dark tense medium-paced

Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

Things we lost in the fire is described by its English translator, Megan McDowell, as part of a South American Gothic tradition. Horror is born within the context of the everyday, built upon a history of violent dictatorships, still echoing in people’s memories and lives years after its supposed conclusion. Poverty, drugs, crime, and violence against women create the background to which Enriquez imagines horrors of such sharpness as to hit you like a gutt-punch, over and over again. One thing McDowell describes in the translator’s note that I found particularly on-point is that while there is often an edge of the supernatural in these stories, Enriquez’s form of horror is always ultimately based in real fears. There is this realness that makes them so very uncomfortable to read, aside from the rawness of the content itself. Despite already being shocked by the first story in this collection — a young woman witnessing the awful living circumstances of a boy on the street, who she finally ends up ignoring despite his obvious signs of neglect - I kept somehow falling into the trap of the safety Enriquez initially lulls the reader into believing could be true. Each story creates a familiar setting with a sense of things, while not necessarily being great at least being liveable, only to turn the everyday into a nightmare with a sharp turn, a twist that hits you like a slap before you know it. Truly, there were moments when I felt mad at the author for managing to manipulate me into trusting myself in her hands - and to have it hit back at me with such force, I remember flinching at least once with every single story.

While the violence is often hard to stomach, on so many levels, I did think there was sharp commentary on among other things how groups act and feed of each other’s energy in violent acts, women’s vulnerability (in society, in relationships) and their attempts to regain power through potentially destructive means, the avoidance and/or blindness to poverty and despair around us and the normalisation of inhumane living circumstances over time. The balancing of a supernatural edge - the fantastical element to the stories always being used to add a nightmarish quality - also worked well to strengthen the exploration of fears - blurring the lines between the real and the imagined, the living and the dead.

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autumn_alwaysreadingseason's review against another edition

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dark tense medium-paced

3.0

Translated horror short stories by Argentinian author Mariana Enriquez. An expert mix of social commentary and gore. Issues/topics include: people experiencing homelessness, mental illness, haunted houses, pollution, unhealthy relationships, social work, neglect, seclusion, and more.

Favorite stories: Adela's House, End of Term, Green Red Orange, and Things We Lost in the Fire.

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samanthaleereads's review against another edition

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challenging dark tense fast-paced

Loveable characters? It's complicated

4.0

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