Today’s 4th story on the 4th is Mariana Enriquez’ “Julie”, from her latest collection called Sunny Places for Shady People.

I love this author. She has converted me into Gothic Horror boy, at least as she writes it.

Her first collection, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is wonderfully dark and her doorstop novel Our Share of Night was a brilliant (and gruesome) precursor to my first trip to Buenos Aires this past January. BA is where she grew up. I read her translated to English but I know I’ll be fluent when I can read her in Spanish (and understand an Almodovar film w/out subtitles).

Julie is our narrator’s cousin. She was born in BA, but her family moved to Vermont when Julie was two years old and have been boasting about their well-to-do LL Bean lifestyle ever since, much to the chagrin of our narrator’s parents, especially the father. While the dad’s sister, her husband and two sons (younger than Julie) portrayed themselves as “rich blond Latinos with a German heritage”, Julie carried the genes of her indigenous grandmother and had grown into an obese 21 year old who eats with both hands and has “dark dead eyes of a rat, untamable hair always bristling, skin the color of cardboard.” An old-fashioned grotesque that Flannery O’Connor would have been proud of.

This all in the first paragraph.

Julie has medical problems and New England appearances are not all that they seem. Her parents have brought her back to Argentina for the health care, and also to have her properly evaluated by psychiatrists. Either she is schizophrenic or severely misunderstood—and to be fair, her relationship with the spirit world would be challenging for anyone to understand.

The thing I’ve notice with Enriquez’ stories is that the monsters are less monstrous than the “normal” people. The parents in this case, the wealthy elite in the novel.

Que riquísimo, esta escritura.