My latest discoveries: MARIANA ENRIQUEZ

I woke up in a city in the south of Poland, in the middle of the night, and there was someone sitting on the edge of my bed. Someone silent and rather small. A boy. He was looking at me, quite intensely, and I felt a mixture of dread and confusion. It actually took me a little while to recollect the short story "The Neighbor's Courtyard" I had been reading on the train from Warsaw a few hours earlier. Little by little, the night light began to seep through the curtains, the boy on the edge of my bed dissipated, and I realised that this was all Mariana Enriquez. Again. 

It was not the first time that it happened. These episodes would keep coming back to me, and the little person from "The Neighbor's Courtyard" was just one of my visitors. They were mostly children. "The Dirty Kid", the one from "Under The Black Water". The girl that entered "Adela's House". They would all make their presence felt in my apartment, in my hotel, even in the street. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Mariana Enriquez can do adults, too, but then nobody can feel it like the kids. And nobody can creep you out like them, either.

My fascination with South American literature never really stopped, and this time it revealed itself through the short stories of Mariana Enriquez. The Argentinian writer and journalist has published several novels and short story collections in the Spanish language but so far only four of them have made it into English. Initially I was seduced by the title The Dangers Of Smoking In Bed as well as the glowing Kazuo Ishiguro quote on the cover (he is a fan), after which I sought out Things We Lost In The Fire. As I opened the very first short story a few days later, I felt the chill and the tingling that always accompany great literature. Indeed, there is no way you can read the first page of "The Dirty Kid" and not be impressed. Her Buenos Aires is stark, expressive, horribly alive.

Mariana Enriquez's writing style is visceral yet somehow elegant. Her sentences have this palpable, almost physical intensity, and she has the knack for always finding the right metaphor. When she writes things like 'sunken eyes of insomnia and too many cigarettes', it creates an eerie mood that complements the ghost story perfectly ("The Lookout"). Her pacing is quite fast (too fast sometimes, as is the case with some stories from the first collection), but she will always place you right in the midst of things. In The Dangers Of Smoking In Bed (confusingly, this was translated into English later than the subsequent Things We Lost In The Fire), she sometimes gets carried away with the physiological aspect. You always feel, however, that her main priority is to create the appropriate effect, and if she needs a man to defecate in a suburb of Buenos Aires (or Barcelona, for that matter), she will do that. 

And oh this effect. The stories get burned into your psyche like delicious cigarette ends. This stuff stays with you. Her horror is literary and the shock effect is never cheap and always well warranted. It really is quite hard to find a contemporary writer of such conviction and blistering originality. The story "Rambla Triste", for instance, presents a uniquely bizarre, and clinically precise, take on immigration. The writing is so distinctive it almost makes everything else feel half-assed.

As I have mentioned previously, I find the second collection Things We Lost In The Fire to be a more accomplished work. While the quality in The Dangers Of Smoking In Bed is always there, a certain sense of a few of these stories being a little rushed never left me ("The Cart", for example, which feels somewhat confused about its own ending). That said, the masterful "The Well" about the ever-present evils of the past (one of her favourite topics; is there a more brutal and haunting line than 'the pain and the sand between the legs' in the aforementioned "The Lookout"?), is vintage Mariana Enriquez. As for Things We Lost In The Fire (incidentally, better than the Low album of the same name), I found it absolutely faultless. The tropes are often familiar: haunted houses, weird kids, demons, witches, etc. It is what she does with them that counts, however. She filters it all through South American magic realism as well as her boundless imagination and takes them to wholly new places. 

In a rather odd turn of events, I bought one of her books while on vacation in France a short while age. It was a small English bookstore, and the woman behind the counter said she loved my choice and I was going to have a good time reading that book. I thanked her and left. A few days later I decided to search for Mariana Enriquez's images online, and to my utter surprise I realised that she looked exactly like the woman in the English bookstore. Not possible, of course, but having read the book, I am no longer too sure. That it was a ghost would be the simplest, and least disturbing, of all explanations.