Her new essay examines horror as a language of memory.
BUENOS AIRES
Argentine writer Mariana Enriquez is challenging conventional interpretations of Latin American literature with a new essay that places historical trauma, political violence and collective memory at the center of contemporary Gothic fiction. In Conversación con la oscuridad, scheduled for release in Argentina in November, she argues that horror offers a distinctive way to examine a region whose troubled past continues to influence its present.
The 272-page volume, subtitled Teorías, intuiciones y escritura del miedo, will be published by Páginas de Espuma. It brings together Enriquez’s reflections on literature, cinema, popular culture and the relationship between fear and social experience.
One of its central arguments concerns the difference between magical realism and the Latin American Gothic. Enriquez interprets the literary boom of the twentieth century as emerging from a period when many writers still imagined the possibility of broad political and social transformation.
Her own generation, she suggests, inherited a different historical landscape. Dictatorships, forced disappearances, economic instability and unfulfilled expectations weakened that earlier confidence, creating conditions in which disturbing narratives could express unresolved collective experiences.
For Enriquez, Gothic fiction does not simply introduce supernatural threats into ordinary life. It reveals unsettling dimensions of environments that initially appear familiar, transforming recognizable streets, homes and communities into places where the past remains disturbingly present.
This approach shifts Gothic imagery away from European castles and remote landscapes toward Argentine suburbs, abandoned buildings, obsolete technologies and the enduring consequences of political repression.
The distinction is an interpretation of literary history rather than a universal classification. Magical realism can contain violence and pessimism, while Gothic fiction can accommodate resistance and transformation.
Enriquez’s argument instead emphasizes the different expectations about history that shape these narrative traditions.
Her perspective reflects an established literary career. Her novel Our Share of Night received Spain’s Herralde Novel Prize in 2019, while her collection A Sunny Place for Shady People won the World Fantasy Award for best collection in 2025.
Her work has been translated into more than 30 languages, expanding international interest in contemporary Latin American horror.
The new volume also examines cinema, crime narratives and the ways fictional forms can represent experiences that remain difficult to address through conventional realism.
Enriquez discussed similar ideas during a presentation in Barcelona, describing Gothic literature as a means of exploring historical memories that continue to shape society.
Her fiction is also moving beyond publishing. Adaptations involving filmmakers Laura Casabé and Pablo Larraín demonstrate growing interest in translating her unsettling literary universe into audiovisual storytelling.
Conversación con la oscuridad is scheduled for presentation in Buenos Aires on November 27, offering readers a closer examination of the intellectual foundations behind her fiction.
The book’s larger proposition is that literary horror can make unresolved histories visible without pretending to resolve them.
For Enriquez, the frightening elements of fiction are not always departures from reality. Sometimes they emerge from the recognition that a society’s past has never entirely disappeared.
When Evidence Speaks, Narratives Change.