Book Review
Title: Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez
Genre: Anthology, Horror
Rating: 4 Stars
As this is an anthology like with the others I have reviewed I will review each story individually and then wrap up my thoughts on the collection as a whole. I haven’t read anything by this author before but it appears on the best horror novels of the past ten years and I decided to pick it up even though I didn’t know anything about it.
The Dirty Kid
The Dirty Kid was a story about a person who lives in a really run down neighbourhood purely because it is her family’s home. This person loves and hates the neighbourhood in equal measure and one thing stands out to them the most, that is mother with a young son and the mother seems to be a drug addict. The narrator is outraged by the way the mother lives with her son and she is heavily pregnant again. One night the boy turns up at her door and she gives him food and takes him for ice cream afterwards, by the time she returns to the neighbourhood the mother is back and essentially attack the narrator for touching her child. Days later she finds out that the body of a decapitated child has been found and the narrator knows it is the boy. When the mother turns up she confronts her asking where the children are as she isn’t pregnant anymore. At first the woman denies she has children but then admits that she gave the children to someone and it seems to be closely linked to devil worship in some way. While it was creepy there wasn’t anything to scary or horrific about it other than the details of the boy’s death.
The Inn
The Inn was interesting but it was lacking for me, we are following Florencia, her sister, Lali and her best friend, Rocio. Florencia and Lali are going with their mother to their summer home while her father’s political campaign is running because of her sister’s unruly behaviour. At the summer home, she meets up with Rocio who tells her that her father was fired from his job because he gave tours about the history of the Inn and the town it is located in. Rocio wants Florencia’s help with a revenge plan and she agrees and that night they sneak into the Inn and begin carrying out their plan and they pause to rest in one of the rooms. During the short amount of time the girls are there something happens where they hear alarms, car and men running through the Inn and this terrifies the girls. They are found by the Inn’s staff who heard them screaming but there is nothing and no one there meaning what happened to the girls must have been supernatural. However, at the end we learn that Florencia is in love with Rocio and we question whether the story was made up to cover up their relationship or whether it actually happened.
The Intoxicated Years
The Intoxicated Years was a creepy and haunting story as we are following three friends, Andrea, Paula and our narrator. The story beings in 1989 with caps on electricity and how the three teenagers get up to no good in the dark. This continues into 1990-91 until they meet Ximena. Ximena is from a rich family unlike the three girls and they use her in order to buy drugs but they are blamed when Ximena has a bad trip and they never see her again easily moving on from their lives. This gets strange around this time as they witness a strange girl disappearing into a park and they become a little obsessed with the idea of finding her in between their bouts of drinking, partying and drug taking. In 1992, they meet Roxana who is a lot like them but she isn’t taken into the friend group as they are only using her for the drugs. However, moving into 1993 Andrea gets a boyfriend and essentially leaves the friend group for him which angers the other two. They do end up meeting again at a party in 1994 but Andrea has brought her boyfriend too. After everyone gets high, the girl appears from the park and it seems like the others become possessed attacking the boy and seemingly killing him before returning to the party like nothing happened. The question here is whether the girl was a product of a drug hallucination or whether she actually existed and something happened to her causing her to become a vengeful ghost but it is unclear.
Adela’s House
Adela’s House was the scariest story so far as we follow three small children, Adela, Pablo and his sister, Clara. Pablo and Adela are slightly older than Clara and are allowed to watch horror movies because of this, partly because both have an obsession with death and amputation because Adela is missing her left arm. After a while, Adela and Pablo become obsessed with a local abandoned house after hearing that Pablo’s mother is afraid of it. The three children visit the house, staying in the garden several times, Adela and Pablo claim they can hear the house talking to them which Clara doesn’t hear. One night they decide to enter the house and explore it, in the living room, they find shelves filling with fingernails, teeth and other things. Pablo and Clara want to leave but they go back for Adela only for her to enter a room and the door locks behind her. Pablo tries to get the door open but he can’t eventually they go to their parents and the house is investigated. The house, however, has changed it is a complete shell inside and nothing like the children described so obviously suspicion is brought on them. Years pass and even after moving away from the house after Pablo makes repeated attempts to find Adela he kills himself. Clara is left wondering about her brother, Adela and the house and she seems to conclude that the house is a gateway to Hell and it consumed both Adela and her brother. However, she is drawn back to the house herself often visiting the garden the same way she did as a child, which makes me think the house might have eventually gotten to her too.
An Invocation of the Big-Eared Runt
I think if no other story does as well as this one An Invocation of the Big-Eared Runt will be my favourite story. We are following Pablo, who works as a guide on a murder tour and one of the murders that fascinates him is the Runt. The Runt unlike the other killers on the tour is a mystery because he killed small children and animals purely because he liked doing it. One day shortly after the birth of his own child, Pablo sees the Runt’s ghost on the tour bus but no one else can see it. It is around here he notices how much his girlfriend has changed since the birth of their child and how he doesn’t hate the child but he doesn’t truly love it either. In a way Pablo resents the child for changing the woman he loved in a variety of ways. As he gives more and more tours, he becomes more and more obsessed with the Runt and the appearances of his ghost. The story ends with Pablo sleeping with a nail in his pocket, symbolising the way the Runt killed a small boy driving a nail through his skull and how he might end up doing the same to his own child.
Spiderweb
Spiderweb was also an interesting story blending mundane reality with the possibility of the supernatural. It begins with a husband and wife going to visit the wife’s aunt and uncle. She has realised by this point in their marriage that she married him impulsively and she doesn’t even like him and this is confirmed as her family also dislike. On an outing with her cousin to buy spiderweb lace, she begins to resent her husband more and more and on the way back the car breaks down. They end up getting towed and spending the night in a hotel where her cousin spends the night with a gorgeous trucker who she’d prefer to take to bed rather than her husband. She ends up staying in a separate room and the following morning as they prepare to head back her husband has vanished. The trucker left two hours before and it poses the question did something supernatural happen to her husband or did her cousin confide in the trucker how poorly he treated his wife and how unhappy she was and the trucker did something about it.
End of Term
End of Term was a disturbing story about a young girl named Marcela who seems to be mentally disturbed. She is near invisible at school until she pulls her fingernails off in class one day and this begins a series of events where Marcela hurts herself and yet seems immune to the pain. A few girls help her out and feel responsible for her until one day Marcela is screaming in the bathroom about a man being there but no one else can see him. After this Marcela drops out of school and one of the girls goes to visit her asking questions about what she said about the man. Marcela responds only with that he will show her himself soon enough and we learn that this girl has also been hurting herself. This makes me question whether it is shared psychosis or a spirit of some sort compelling the girls to injure themselves but it does pose some interesting questions.
No Flesh over Our Bones
No Flesh over Our Bones was an dark story about a woman who finds a skull one day, inside the skull is the name Tati and the year 1975. She thinks about who the skull could have belonged to and soon becomes obsessed with it. The woman isn’t happy with her life or relationship and her boyfriend often hears her talking to the skull. After a while she kicks him out because she can’t stand his concern and he learns that she has done more things to the skull by putting a wig on it and surrounding it with candles almost like she is worshipping it. After this she stops eating and begins losing weight rapidly which is what she wants. When her mother comes to visit she appeases her by explaining that it is all for a Halloween party before setting off on her true mission of completing the body by finding bones to build a body for the skull in any way she can.
The Neighbor’s Courtyard
The Neighbor’s Courtyard centres around husband and wife, Paula and Miguel as they are moving into a new home after Paula was fired from her job. Paul used to work at a children’s shelter which was an emotionally draining job and after drinking and smoking on the job one night she is fired with just cause as she didn’t hear the cries of a small girl who broke her ankle during the night. Pretty soon after moving into the new house Paula sees and hears things that her husband doesn’t and he believes her be to crazy. He ends up going to stay with his mother, Monica after Paula claims to see a boy chained up in the neighbor’s courtyard. Paula watches the house for days before she breaks in and finds some disturbing things there, after almost being caught she makes it back to her own house where she hears her cat clearly in pain. Running into the bedroom she finds the boy, although it is clear he isn’t human killing her cat before coming for her. I don’t know whether these were hallucinations but Paula is right in saying you don’t feel pain in your dreams so she assumes it real. I can’t say what happened to Paula as it isn’t shown to us but it is creepy.
Under the Black Water
Under the Black Water has the same feel as Lovecraft as we follow Marina, a DA investigating the deaths of two boys after police officers pushed them into a polluted river. Marina interviews one of the officers involved and gets nothing from him but a pregnant girl visits her telling her that one of the boys, Emanuel is still alive and living in the Villa Moreno. Even though, Marina doesn’t believe the girl she decides to check it out anyway. She is already aware of a lot of children being born with mutations because of the pollution but she wasn’t expecting to be confronted with what she saw. She is told by the local priest that Emanuel woke something living in the water and that he waits dreaming. He also explains the deformed child she was led there by is his child and that Emanuel is basically possessed by whatever was living under the water. She witnesses the parade of Emanuel’s seemingly dead body and she flees the horrific place but I have a feeling that she will return at some point. While I liked the story I would have liked more depth about the thing living in the water and Emanuel’s role in it all.
Green Red Orange
Green Red Orange was an interesting story about isolation, we are following the former girlfriend of Marco, who after coming off his antidepressants locks himself in his room and he hasn’t come out for years. Marco who likes to be known as M only communication via chat messages online with the girlfriend. Despite his depression nothing had happened in Marco’s life to make him isolate himself this way and no one understands it but the girlfriend carries on trying to understand Marco’s mindset. While he doesn’t scare her in the slightest his talk of the dark web and the things that can be found there unnerves her especially since Marco seems to be obsessed with everything he can find there especially videos and communities centred around rape and torture. In the end he is still in the room even though both the girlfriend and Marco’s mother are considering taking more drastic measures but Marco asks her how she knows it is really him to talking to her which might be a hint about what has happened or what is happening in that room.
Things We Lost in the Fire
Things We Lost in the Fire is the final story in the collection and the one the collection is named after, so I was excited to see what was in store. The final story centres around burning as we follow Silvina who tells us about a burned girl who lives in the subway and how she came to be burned. Most people are disgusted by her but her story inspired a lot of men to burn women so in return the women begin burning themselves in a manner that allows a lot of them to survive. People quickly realise if this is allowed to continue the world will be filled with men and burned women that no one wants destroying everything so the raids begin. Silvina is inspired by her mother actions when she punches a boy on the train for talking badly about the burned girl and they join the revolution. Silvina even records several of the burnings known as bonfires to show the women aren’t being forced to do it. However, she begins to question whether it is the right thing but the movement can’t be stopped and soon her own time for burning is going to arrive.
Overall, Things We Lost in the Fire was a good collection, there were a few stories that I really enjoyed like Things We Lost in the Fire, Green Red Orange, Adela’s House and An Invocation of the Big-Eared Runt but it just seemed to be a little lacking in my opinion. This could be due to the fact it is a translated work or because the stories weren’t expanded on enough but it left me wanting more and not in a good way.
Buy it here:
Paperback/Hardcover: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
Kindle Edition: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
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