Title: A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enriquez
Publication Date- 09/17/24
Publisher- Penguin Random House Group
Overall Rating- 3 out of 5 stars

Review copy given to me by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Review: A Sunny Place for Shady People is a collection of horror/literary stories by Mariana Enriquez. If you are planning to pick this up, here are some themes you should expect to find: body horror, women’s health, commentary on womanhood, animal harm, dying, illness, and cancer.

I rated each story individually, overall combined rating would fall around 3 stars. I think the best way to write this review is to acknowledge a few things. This collection is written really well, I have no complaints about the writing. Some of the storytelling is better in some stories than others, however overall not a major complaint. The topics are harsh (but very real and valid) and at times felt more heavy than maybe I wanted or was ready for. This is a personal preference which is why I’m noting it in the review and was not a major contributor to my star rating. Because the issues discussed in these stories is heavy, the overall tone was very sad. I tell you this in hopes you will consider your overall mood and expectations for when you pick it up.

The author does a great job of bringing to light, in a very visceral way, major concerns in women’s health that are often neglected, seen as shameful or abused. I did appreciate her discussions on this and queerness.

I really liked the first few stories but honestly the quality and clarity went downhill as we went on. Basic impressions of each story are included here:

-My Sad Dead: 4 - CW cancer. I really appreciate the matter-of-fact ness and humor/irony that suffuses the discussions around crime and the middle class anxiety around it.
-A Sunny Place for Shady People: 4 - CW drug use/overdose. I liked the kindness and empathy shown to addicts and homeless without glorifying or romanticizing it. Also how one can grieve and love what isn’t necessarily good for you.
-Face of Disgrace: 3 - CW rape, suicide. This one felt more conventionally “horror” than the others but it also made a lot less sense and left us very unresolved.
-Julie: 3 - well written but generally fatphobic and also very weird??
-Night Birds: 3 - the first story that doesn't have any overt queerness. Another one that felt very unresolved and kind of passive
-Metamorphosis: 3 - another weird one that I definitely wish was a bit more lyrical (maybe that’s lost in the translation? I can’t be sure)
-Hyena Hymns: 3 - I was really into the setup with the hyenas and the old ruined house, but the actual climax was so weird and abrupt and solved so quickly that it just felt off.
-Different Colors Made of Tears: 4 - I really liked the body horror in this one
-The Suffering Woman: 3 - CW: cancer. I’m starting to think this author or someone very close to her had cancer and she was dealing with it in whatever way she could: by writing about it.
-The Refrigerator Cemetery: 4 - this one just had such a cool and vivid setting. Just the image of rows upon rows of rusty abandoned refrigerators, many of which would have been filled with various things over the years.
-A Local Artist: 2 - this one was weird and nonsensical and, again, ends with absolutely no resolution. The theme of the abandoned town (and possibly stopped time?) could have been very interesting but the artist was bizarre and not in a compelling way.
-Black Eyes: 3 - again with the cancer. And again with not giving us a real taste of what the horror is.

A Sunny Place For Shady People is a collection of horror short stories and my first introduction to this author. As someone who is easily frightened, I have to admit that these stories definitely gave me chills. Mariana Enriquez's writing is very powerful and unsettling. She delves into both supernatural horror and real life terrors, so be sure to check the content warnings before diving in. Overall, it was a fantastic collection of short stories, and I am definitely interested in reading more of her books. Thanks to Random House Publishing Group and Netgalley for the arc in exchange for an honest review.

My introduction to Mariana Enriquez came via her epic tome Our Share of Night. For A Sunny Place for Shady People she returns to Megan McDowell for translating her work from spanish into english. McDowell is a gifted translator as a lot of the jokes and nuances definitely hit in A Sunny Place for Shady People in a way that in some translations tends to fall flat. The most interesting difference between Our Share of Night and A Sunny Place for Shady People is the amount of humor in the latter that definitely wasn’t present in the former. Enriquez pokes fun at gringos, the US and Argentine government, American propriety, true crime fans, etc. This collection is still horrific in the same way that Our Share of Night was but it’s interesting to read Enriquez’s writing that is set in a mostly contemporary setting. It feels like since she isn’t working on a massive decade spanning epic, Enriquez allowed herself to have a little more fun here. She writes about the pandemic in the titular story, a story set in LA so it also includes Elisa Lam and P-22. There's creepy children and homeless outreach in “Black Eyes,” and an AirBnB stay gone awry in “A Local Artist.” One of my favorite things about Enriquez’s writing is that she combines supernatural horror with the horrors of the world: government failure, our deeply narcissistic culture, patriarchy. I first read “The Refrigerator Cemetery” in the recent McSweeney’s horror compendium and it remains a favorite. For me, “The Refrigerator Cemetery” balances the grim capacity of humans with karmic supernatural ablution the best, this seems to be the thesis of A Sunny Place for Shady People: all matters of people finally get what is coming to them either by natural or supernatural means. The most impactful stories are about women and how they either get the last laugh or it gets them. As a whole it is a collection of short stories I’ll return to and is a must read for fans of Shirley Jackson and Brian Everson.

I read this book by receiving an ARC from Hogarth and NetGalley. Thank you to Hogarth and NetGalley. Pre-order A Sunny Place for Shady People here.

Thank you to the author Mariana Enriquez, publishers Hogarth, and NetGalley for an advance digital copy of A SUNNY PLACE FOR SHADY PEOPLE. All views are mine.

“Yes, they know the basement was used for torture. But the place was a lot of other things, too. A summer house for those rich people, who by the way made all that cheese you ate last night, so you’ve already got Evil in you. p101

A SUNNY PLACE is my third read from Matiana Enriquez, and I just love her work. She always challenges me, both emotionally and intellectually, which is what reading is all about for me. I want to feel and think in New ways as a result of what I've read. Enriquez always delivers.

This collection felt personal to me because of the frequency with which it centered disability and mental illness. I wasn't always comfortable with her treatment of these subjects, as a reader affected by both topics. But I really felt like she was challenging me to empathize with characters and thought systems that I didn't understand. I just don't see how that's bad.

I always recommend Enriquez's work, and this collection is no different. But this collection fairly demands the right readers. I recommend this for fans of weird horror/fiction, pink horror, feminist horror, diverse horror authors, settings, and characters.

Reading Notes

Three (or more) things I loved:

1. Her handling of Gothic elements is just chef's kiss omg.

2. This is how you do a run-on! He always told me he liked Hispanic women because they seemed strong and maternal and I’d get mad, that awful gringo stereotype, and he laughed and I never again saw a laugh like that, with those beautiful teeth that the street and the madness couldn’t ruin, all the joy that lit up every one of his features and made his eyes shine, he who was always so somber and blue, except when he turned manic and life seemed beautiful to him, but that was just as heartbreaking because it was only a chemical reaction, he had no idea what he was feeling or saying. p36

Three (or less) things I didn't love:

This section isn't only for criticisms. It's merely for items that I felt something for other than "love" or some interpretation thereof.

1. I've seen this author do it before, rely on mental health stigma as a horror element. I hate it, it's bullshit. But she writes great horror otherwise. *edit I think Enriquez is not promoting the prejudices she presents in her characters and stories, but challenging them.

2. She seemed beyond saving to me: some people just let themselves go for too long, and one day they wake up crazy and monstrous. That’s how Julie was. Full-on abandonment. And we didn’t even know exactly what was wrong with her. p64 This ableism clearly originates with the narrating character, but it's a common trope and one I've seen Enriquez use before. In reality, the mysteriously ill are not beyond saving. No sick or disabled person is beyond saving, because no person is. *edit: It’s not easy to differentiate between a bad mood and returning depression. But I know: it’s a bad mood. I think of last night, when we’d f*cked and gone to sleep with the window open, waiting for the black storm over the mountains, and yes, it’s a bad mood. p96 This is brilliant mental health rep, and it makes me think when she is ableist, even though that is often, that she means to be for a literary reasons.

3. Many of the stories here end on an extremely abstract note. It's hard to say what Enriquez is trying to say with this repeated technique.

Rating: 🧛‍♂️🧛‍♂️🧛‍♂️🧛‍♂️ /5 clever monsters
Recommend? Yes!
Finished: Aug 27 '24
Format: Digital arc, NetGalley
Read this book if you like:
👻 spooky stories
👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 family stories, family drama
🦾 disability and ableism
❤️‍🩹 pink / feminist horror
📚 diverse authors, settings, characters

A few words about the stories:

1. "My Sad Dead" - a creepy, sad ghost story about how ghosts haunt the pitiless, but never remorse: Would I have opened the door? Or would I have acted like all the others?” “Maybe you wouldn’t have opened,” he answered. “But you would have at least called the police. They didn’t even do that?” “They didn’t even do that,” I replied. p26

2. "A Sunny Place For Shady People" - A complex story about grief and the inability to let go.

3. "Face of Disgrace" - Holy crap I am never going to hear a whistle the same way again! This story is haunting.

4. "Julie" - I started to appreciate Julie’s elegance, the grace in how she rejected all her parents’ hopeless vulgarity. In how she had ruined her body until it was grotesque as demonstration of the fact that even so, it was beautiful in a place that we couldn’t reach and she could. Did I admire her? I don’t know. I envied her a little. I didn’t want her to be abandoned, but I didn’t want to be her caretaker, either. p68 Horror stories about disability are common; what isn't, are stories like this one that are built on empathy for disability.

5. "Night Birds" - On the shores of this river, all the birds that fly, drink, perch on branches, and disturb siestas with the demonic squawking of the possessed— all those birds were once women. p73 What a great concept! Turns into a story about a character with a "rotting disease," like leprosy. More ableism in this one.

6. "Metamorphosis" - A piece about identity, the body, and modern medicine from traditional and nontraditional sources.

7. "Hyena Hymns" - “He talks shit about Argentina nonstop, says stuff like ‘I would understand if my kids left,’‘They can go if they want, they have passports.’” “Eighty percent of Argentines will say the same thing, and then the minute they hear a zamba they’ll start bawling.” p I love stories that explore the meaning of "home" and the various attitudes we hold about a place we need so much.

8. "Different Colors Made of Tears" - I know I can’t say this in public and I certainly shouldn’t feel it, and I know old people have plenty of problems, solitude and meager pensions and cruel children and getting sick and losing their minds, but I just don’t like them— I don’t like old people. I don’t know what I’ll do when I’m old myself: I hope I die before I get there. It’s a strange feeling: I get the sense that they’re faking. That the aches and pains, the plodding steps, the constant chatter about illnesses and doctors, the smell of their skin, the false or decayed teeth, the same anecdotes told and retold— it’s all an act put on to irritate. p109 I thought I knew what this story was going to do with such blatant ageism on part of the narrator, but I was wrong. I'm not sure at all why it's there.

9. "A Suffering Woman" - A story about sickness, our fear of sickness, and how we are affected emotionally by others' sickness.

10. "The Refrigerator Cemetery" - This is definitely my favorite story in the collection. It's heartbreaking though, and once ago, there's a touch of illness.

11. "A Local Artist" - Some fascinating art content in this one. Enriquez is excellent with description!

12. "Black Eyes" - Just a really excellent twist on the classic vamp.

Wow, this collection of horror short stories by Mariana Enriquez, beautifully translated by Megan McDowell, is an eery and gripping page-turner. This is a good book to read with Halloween approaching. I appreciated how most of the main characters were women, and while the stories are disconnected, there are themes such as mental anguish taking physical forms. The way that trauma manifests in a physical space is another theme. This feels like a feminine approach to horror. I also got a strong sense of place in Argentina which I appreciated. Recommended, although you may want to read this during the daytime. I look forward to reading more of Mariana Enriquez' work. Thanks to Random House and NetGalley for the eARC.

I absolutely loved these horrifying stories by Mariana Enriquez! Mostly told about women, these stories made me not want to read this book at night. The book centers its stories around Buenos Aires and how eerie and strange it, and the people, can be. I especially loved the last three stories and felt this book just got more horrifying as it progressed! Definitely a must read for horror fans!

Thank you to NetGalley for providing a review copy.

Mariana Enriquez is one of those authors I had always meant to read and just never quite got around to it. When I got the chance to read her new collection, I jumped at the chance. It was everything I hoped it would be. The writing is beautiful, and there are horrors both supernatural and all too real, body horror and mythological terrors. I'll definitely be seeking out the rest of her works. 4.5 stars

My Sad Dead ⭐⭐⭐⭐
A Sunny Place For Shady People ⭐⭐⭐⭐.5
Face of Disgrace ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Julie ⭐⭐⭐⭐.5
Night Birds ⭐⭐⭐⭐.5
Metamorphosis ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Hyena Hymns ⭐⭐⭐.5
Different Colors Made of Tears ⭐⭐⭐⭐.75
The Suffering Woman ⭐⭐⭐⭐.25
The Refrigerator Cemetery ⭐⭐⭐
A Local Artist ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Black Eyes ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

***I was provided an ARC of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. A big thank you to the publisher and NetGalley!***

This collection of short horror stories is scary, gross, bleak, funny, depressing and absolutely beautifully written. This is the second book by Mariana Enriquez that I have had the pleasure to read, the first being Our Share Of Night. I can honestly say that I am now a big fan of her work and will seek out all of her other works.

Most of the stories in this collection are 5 star top notch reads. The great thing about the collection is that even when the story isn’t satisfying, the writing is so great that you don’t feel like you wasted your time.

I recommend this to all horror fans who like their stories on the more wordy and elegant side of the spectrum. It may appeal more to seasoned readers of the genre than to someone who would impulse buy this title at a book store or supermarket. Also, reader be warned, there is some gross imagery on display here and some topics that may be triggering to certain people.

I love Mariana Enriquez so much, I’m attempting to learn Spanish so I don’t have to wait for her work to be translated. Her latest collection, A Sunny Place for Shady People, is her strongest, most disturbing collection yet.

There are several strong themes in this book. The first is spirits attached to places of trauma. The opening story, My Sad Dead, concerns a woman who starts to see ghosts of the recently departed in her violent Argentine neighborhood. Hyena Hymns has claimed the crown for Enriquez’s most terrifying story, in which a couple visit one partner’s home town, visit an abandoned mansion, and things get absolutely horrifying. The Suffering Woman is one of the most moving stories I’ve ever read, and it concerns an apartment haunted by previous occupants who were dealing with a severe illness. Just absolutely heartbreaking.

There’s also a theme of how inward suffering can take a physical form. Face of Disgrace is an extremely powerful tale of sexual assault survivors, as our central character’s face begins to disappear. There are some truly terrifying images in this story. Metamorphosis beautifully captures the complexities of the middle-aged woman. A woman has fibroids removed, and her uterus, and repurposes it as a body modification.

There are also stories of the uncanny, such as Julie, where we have a family attempting to suck the Argentina healthcare system dry, as they grapple with their daughter’s sexual relationship with ghosts. A Local Artist reminded me of Robert Aickman, as a couple visit a small town with a gallery in an abandoned train station, in which the “local artist” is very strange indeed.

The titular story sent me down a rabbit hole on the real life case of Elisa Lam and her mysterious death at the Cecil Hotel. This was a perfect LA story, about the weird juxtaposition of grime and sunshine.

Every story in this collection is powerful in its own right, and further proves that Enriquez is just an absolute master of horror. Her stories are intelligent, thought-provoking, and ripe for in-depth analysis.

These stories were not exactly scary, but were haunting in their tone and style. Even in the ones I didn’t like as much, the writing really pulled me in. While nothing here was especially stand out, the collection as a whole has a tone and feel that was perfectly executed and lingered with me after I finished the book.

Personal favorites were: My Sad Dead, Night Birds, and Refrigerator Cemetery.
3.5 stars, rounded to 4 because the tone is so good.

Note: ARC provided by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

This was an interesting collection of stories. I had high expectations since I liked her other anthologies but I was a bit disappointed by this one. There were a few great stories in the mix but I wasn't really obsessed with this. I would still recommend reading this though, especially if you're a fan of literary fiction and anthologies.

Big thank you to Netgalley and Random House Publishing Group for this ARC.

This is the first book I've ready by Mariana Enriquez. Her writing style is beautiful, but the stories just didn't work for me. She put a lot of soul into her stories, but I think I was looking for more traditional horror.

I enjoyed a few of these stories, a few were fine but forgettable and few I just didn’t get at all. A lot of the concepts were great, then the execution would be all over the place. I’ve really loved this author in the past but her last couple releases haven’t been doing it for me. She certainly knows how to do slow, creeping horror though and this collection left me with some incredibly vivid imagery I won’t soon forget.

Mariana Enriquez weaves wonderfully eerie tales in this new collection of haunting short stories.

This is perfect for fall and people who like reading short stories.

This is definitely a collection to be read one at a time- maybe one a day for 12 days. The stories are not linked, the collection not really cohesive, but each story has its own merit. There's an element of horror in most of them but it's not grotesque. Know that this format doesn't give the reader a chance to get to know any of the women particularly well (yes, that's also a fault of the writer) but they are people you likely will recognize. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. For short story fans.

Thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for a free digital arc in exchange for an honest review.

The title caught my eye on this one, and I was even more intrigued by the description. I also am trying to read more translated works when I can. I'm sad to say that this one, although compelling enough to get me all the way through the collection, was kind of disappointing.

My favorite stories from this were "My Sad Dead" and "Different Colors Made of Tears" because I really felt like they were the most thought-provoking. A lot of these felt more like bizarro fiction than outright horror--but that may have just been me. I found the one titled "Julie" more funny than anything else. I will admit though, that it really felt like a lot of the same after a while, and I honestly don't have a super strong memory for the last two of the collection. I will say that the titular short story does feature the death of Elisa Lam... I didn't find it horribly graphic. I feel like I've heard more graphic descriptions of real-life crimes in true crime podcasts, stories, tv shows, etc. But I still had a problem with it... in that it felt like the author was just using the death as clout for a character's plot that I felt the connection was tenuous at best.

I'd be open to trying other collections from this author... but this was a mostly miss for me.

Wonderfully terrifying. Every story will haunt me forever. At times I think I was holding my breath from fear for the characters. As someone with their own ghost stories, this collection takes the cake.

Like any short story collection this one contains some truly excellent stories, and some that aren't as good, but the excellent ones out number the others making this one of my favorite horror collections from the last few years.

I love how Mariana Enriquez using horror as the method to deliver her views on political and social injustices in our society. The writing is smart and will leave you contemplating things long after your finish the stories.

This author has become a "must-read" for me and has made herself a name in the horror community.

This book was really magical. I just finished Our Share of Night days ago and I had signed for this and it felt full circle to received this ARC.
So far, Mariana Enriquez doesn’t disappoint with her writing, as I said, I just finished Our share of night, i had to buy dancers of smoking in bed and then this new collection. I love how she incorporates real events in fiction, it gives me such an insight of something i already know happened but in such a cool different POV. The Elisa Lam story here was just so well executed. She really is becoming one of my favorite writers to the day. This book was so good I might need to request the paperback.