Mariana Enríquez's essay Conversación con la oscuridad reads horror as a lens on modern fears

A book built from years of talks

Conversación con la oscuridad, published by Páginas de Espuma, gathers Enríquez's reflections, opinions and knowledge about horror and gothic literature. According to El País, the volume grew out of classes, lectures and interviews, and was shaped with the help of academic Inti Soledad Bustos and editor Juan Casamayor. It is organized into five blocks on space, time, subjectivity, bodies and trauma. Enríquez, who is also a journalist, describes the book as a point of arrival rather than a change in her views. El Periódico reports that the idea came from Bustos, who worried that the talks Enríquez had given would be lost.

Monsters that change with each era

Enríquez argues that classic monsters never carry the same meaning twice. La Razón reports her view that Frankenstein's creature, a monster of technology, has become the artificial intelligence of 2001, a machine that turns against its makers. El Mundo quotes her saying that each generation bends these monsters to fit its own fears.

“Classic monsters and the archetypes of the genre change their meaning with each era.”

The vampire has followed the same path. In her account, the figure carried a new meaning during the AIDS pandemic and now points to teenage consumer power. El Mundo's headline casts tech billionaires who dream of living forever as the contemporary vampires, a comparison that El Periódico also draws in its own framing of Silicon Valley.

Dictatorship and the ghosts it left

Enríquez ties horror in Argentine writing to the trauma of the dictatorships. El Periódico cites her essay on what makes the country's horror stories powerful.

“The most powerful Argentine horror stories are those that say, obliquely, what political testimony cannot say directly.”

La Razón reports her view that social traumas always turn into ghosts, while she resists reducing horror to a metaphor for society. ABC recounts her childhood in Lanús, an industrial suburb of Buenos Aires, where families had to ask police permission even to hold a birthday party. She describes her parents as paranoid in that period and says she only understood its effect on her later, in retrospect.

Tour and Netflix adaptation

Enríquez, who moved to Tasmania a year ago with her husband, is on a tour that El Periódico says includes eight public presentations, with the first on Monday in Barcelona. The same outlet notes that she shipped more than 5,000 books from Argentina to her new home. Her work is also reaching screens through Mis muertos tristes, a Netflix miniseries that Chilean director Pablo Larraín adapted from three of her stories. Enríquez said she liked that the series features four women who are over 50 and look it.