Mariana Enriquez: "It frustrates me a lot not to be able to see ghosts"

BarcelonaA year and a half ago, Mariana Enriquez (Buenos Aires, 1973) left Argentina and settled in Launceston, in the north of the island of Tasmania. Before leaving the country where he had been born, raised, worked and, finally, succeeded with novels such as Our share of night (Anagrama, 2019), Enriquez needed to take stock of the authors who had marked her throughout almost four decades of obsessive reading. "While I was finishing that book, Archipelago [Ampersand, 2025], my library was traveling by ship from Buenos Aires, and it could have been lost forever –he recalls now from Barcelona, with a new essay recently published, Conversation with darkness (Páginas de Espuma, 2026)–. For a few days I fantasized about the idea of a shipwreck: it would have opened a period of inevitable mourning, but at the same time it would have forced me to start a new library from scratch".

Since Mariana Enriquez's thousands of books ended up reaching Tasmania, the writer was able to continue digging into the roots of her literature. If Archipelago focused on the importance of having read from a very early age authors such as H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, Cormac McCarthy, Alan Moore and Silvina Ocampo, Conversation with darkness explores from a theoretical point of view how horror, the gothic, and the body horror and spectroscopy.

At the foundations of Enriquez's taste are "mythologies like those of the Guarani culture and also Greek ones, episodes from the Bible such as the Massacre of the Innocents [recorded in the Gospel of Matthew], the stories of Julio Cortázar and novels like Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë". Also movies of the subgenre slasher and the fact that her mother was a doctor. "From a very young age they let me watch movies slasher, where often a killer pursued creatures and killed them, but, on the other hand, they did not allow me to see The Exorcist –he recalls–. It is curious, because a priest can cure you of possessions. The murderers ended up giving me nightmares". Regarding doctors, he remembers that he was obsessed with studying and scribbling in the anatomy books that were around his house. "Doctors never speak delicately about what they do with patients –he says–. I realized it very soon thanks to my mother's work".

Historical and personal traumas

"When I decided I would write horror, I had to think about what the historical fears and traumas of my society were, which at the same time ended up being my own personal fears and traumas," she comments. Instead of writing about Lovecraft's monsters or the gothic that germinates in castles like Count Dracula's, Enriquez "delved into the historical, political and regional dimension" of the genre. "The generation of the disappeared is that of my parents, and the trauma they suffered is directly mine," the author continues. "Living through the dictatorship and the post-dictatorship meant a direct, daily and constant exposure to horror." Enriquez recalls that the first time she mentioned the ghosts of the dictatorship in a story was in one of the tales in Los peligros de fumar en la cama (Anagrama, 2009), inspired by the anecdote that a friend, the daughter of disappeared people, had told her: "She played with a Ouija board with other classmates to talk to their parents, to know if they were still alive or if they had killed them." "Writing about these topics, I have not sought nor found any refuge," she adds. "I do not compete with reality, I take elements from it and incorporate them, and I even deform them when it suits me."

Reading Conversación con la oscuridad one can see how Latin America has become an ideal territory for cultivating horror literature, with contemporary examples such as those of Fernanda Trías, Mónica Ojeda, and Ana Paula Maia. "To political violence and trauma, one must add cynical democracies, political corruption, inequality, the economic crisis, and, in many countries, criminal violence as a structure of power," opines Enriquez, who draws in the essay a very complete map of her obsessions, which have been "numerous" and which continue to grow thanks to filmmakers like Julia Ducournau, Ari Aster, and Paco Plaza and the reading of writers like Diego Muzzio and Attila Veres. "Lately, I have been thinking a lot about why female writers and filmmakers give such great importance to the body," she comments. "For a woman, looking in the mirror is not the same as when a man does it. I am not only talking about the medical-aesthetic pressure, but also about the tension of knowing that we can be recorded at any moment."

Structured into five large chapters –called "vertebrae"– the book navigates through literary ghost stories like Beloved, by Toni Morrison, through the unhealthy Argentine devotion to the lifeless body of Eva Perón, through numerous cinematic and musical allusions, or through the most extraordinary spirit house the author has ever heard of, a castle located in Romania. "Iulia's father, Bogdan Petricieu, during mourning for his deceased daughter began to receive messages that dictated how he had to build a castle that would function as a portal between the world of the living and that of the dead –she recalls–. He believed the messages came from her. They dictated not only the architectural plans for the construction, but musical scores and a dictionary of terminology of the Afterlife that he did not manage to complete. If the story is true, it is one of the few architectures dictated by a ghost. I would love to be able to visit this castle someday".

Despite her obsessive writing and constant reflection on horror, Mariana Enriquez laments the absence of supernatural experiences in her life. "It frustrates me a lot not to be able to see ghosts –she asserts–. My aunt encounters them constantly. The only time something a little strange happened to me was when one night I saw a shadow passing behind me in the room, and when I asked my father the next day if it had been him, he told me that he hadn't moved from the bedroom. It was a day I hadn't been drinking or taken any other drugs, I assure you".