The Dangers of Smoking In Bed by Mariana Enríquez

This is short stories which are not entirely my jam, although I have loved things I have read by this author and translated by this translator. The author is is from Buenos Aires and sets most of her stories there, operates on the boggy ground between recognizable daily life and the dark-running streams of fear, rational and irrational, we all have inside us. It isn’t quite as strong as the others I have read, but it does contain a handful of brilliantly unsettling stories. If you want to wince, flinch, and momentarily panic when you switch on a light, this is a book for you. Let me give you an example. In the very first story a woman attempts to strangle the undead corpse of a three-month-old baby – her great aunt – this is fiction that wants to disturb and unsettle its readers, and breaking the rules that suggest a placid story is a good one can be just as productive as following them.