The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez

I got up and ran to the kitchen to get the gloves I used for washing dishes. The angel baby followed me. And that was only the first sign of her demanding personality. I didn't hesitate. I put the gloves on and grabbed her little neck and squeezed. It's not exactly practical to try and strangle a dead person, but a girl can't be desperate and reasonable at the same time. I didn't even make her cough; I just got some bits of decomposing flesh stuck to my gloved fingers, and her trachea was left in full view.

I really enjoyed "Angelita Unearthed," the first story in Mariana Enriquez's collection The Dangers of Smoking in Bed. In the story, a young woman digs up some small bones in her yard. Her father is skeptical, but her grandmother insists they are the bones of her sister who died as a baby, and whom she dug up and carted to this new house many years ago when they moved. When the baby's spirit appears, it appears as a baby of rotting flesh with many demands: it pesters the protagonist until she returns to the house where she was born and buried. I liked how physical the ghost is, not diaphanous or bodiless like so many other ghosts: in the scene above, the protagonist literally tears chunks of flesh out of her, though her essence seems unharmed. Taking the ghost baby back does not seem to quell its restless spirit; it follows the protagonist still, until the protagonist realizes that she, too, can torment her tormenter: "I made her run after me on her bare little feet that, rotten as they were, left her little white bones in view."

Unfortunately, I didn't really like the other stories. Most of them struck me as the kind of one-note ghost story that's never quite developed past the initial idea. There's promise in some of those ideas, like a story in which a beloved goth musician who commits suicide is exhumed and devoured by his most devoted teen fans, or "Where Are You, Dear Heart?," about a woman whose fetish is listening to arrhythmic heartbeats, and the man with the cardiac conditions who lets her torture his heart with pills and drugs. There's some interesting social commentary lurking here, as in the (too) long story "Those Who Came Back," in which abused and disappeared children begin returning all over Argentina. (That they come back different is a given for anyone who's ever seen a zombie story or read Pet Sematary.) I was interested in another story, "Rambla Triste," which dealt with overtourism in Barcelona, and features a hellish neighborhood that literally traps locals while letting tourists pass through.

The stories, with their focus on the macabre, and especially on teen girls--and, OK, a little because of the Latin American setting and context--reminded me of Monica Ojeda's Jawbone, but for the most part, they struck me as too predictable, too safe, and not scary enough. Their tight, sort of predictable structures resemble the kind of ghost stories you might tell at a bonfire, but they don't have the kind of freewheeling horror that anything can happen, as Ojeda's novel does.