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You call your lifelong fascination with cemeteries ‘necro-tourism’. But in Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave, cemeteries are often celebrated as places of Life-in-Death, laden with folk wisdom and urban tales, flowers and various forms of irrationalism, scenes of sex and revelry and many moving acts of remembrance.

Can you speak a little about how cemeteries offer a space that is different from so much in the contemporary world? 

One of the things I love about cemeteries – that I don’t think you often feel in contemporary life – is time. You feel time – the recent graves are completely different to the old graves, many of the old graves don’t have names anymore, they are completely forgotten. So here we can feel how time passes, how history passes, when today is almost always a whirlwind of the present, and things barely have context, things barely have history – or at least not history with the gravitas of real time. Cemeteries retain that gravitas.

Also, these are places people barely visit, not even tourists. They become a contemplative space, a space for remembering our ancestors without judging them, for communing with the dead – all these very intelligent things. And yet no one is there, even though cemeteries are also beautiful places to walk in. That interests me, because this is a place that we hold sacred, that takes up a lot of space, especially in crowded cities where you think: Why are people not taking it for themselves? And they don’t, because it’s holy ground, even if the sculptures and monuments are often in a state of ruin and the place is forgotten.

So, there’s an avoidance there – explained by a fear of death, of course, and people having too little time. ‘Why would you do that – visit cemeteries?’ is a sentiment often expressed to me, voicing some kind of disgust at my fascination with cemeteries, as if I did something like, I don’t know, collect vomit.

The book has a wonderful chapter dealing with your theft of a bone from the Paris Catacombs, a bone you christen François after Rabelais and then talk to like a friend. This reminds me of the vein of comedy, often black, often hyperbolic, that features in your stories.

What is the role of comedy in your work, and what is the relationship between comedy and horror?

You can say things with humour and horror that you can’t say in other forms. To take the example you mention, you can’t really talk about stealing a bone from the Paris Catacombs in a realistic tone, because it very quickly becomes desecrating a grave – a crime. But if you use humour, it’s different. It exposes the absurdity of the whole situation – the absurdity of a pile of bones underground that people visit for tourism – what? – and also the absurdity of the entire cult of souvenirs, especially when it involves macabre places, full of human remains and suffering. Of course there is a lot of absurdity in tragedy too, which is near to horror. In my case, though, I don’t think in advance, ‘I am going to make this funny’, it is something that just comes when you let yourself go and instinctively know when to laugh, a fine line in the writing of horror. But it’s the same reason we laugh at funerals or at church, a sense of irreverence in these kind of solemn situations. Again, that sense of the absurd. Of the preposterous. I like gloomy things, but I’m not a gloomy person.

I’m interested in the origin of your stories. If we look at an early tale, ‘Angelita Unearthed’ – involving the visceral ghost of a child from the family’s past whose bones have been disturbed – this feels to me like a real human situation that has been somehow mythologised as horror.

How did ‘Angelita Unearthed’ originate?

Concerning ‘Angelita Unearthed’, the basic story is true. It comes from something my grandmother told me when I was little. My grandmother used to tell me that her little sister, whose name was Julia, had died as children often died in those days – painful, yes, but perhaps not a terrible tragedy, not an uber-traumatic situation, because there were fifteen brothers and sisters, or something like that, and one baby had died. They buried her in Corrientes Province, in the backyard of the house. And my grandmother said that when it rained the girl cried. You could hear her cry, my grandmother said, and as a folk practice – which they do up there in the north, because it floods a lot – they buried bottles upside down to try to stop the rain. A sort of superstition that also appears in the story.

When I heard this from my grandmother, she was living with us in Lanús in Buenos Aires Province. I was maybe six or seven, and as a child I didn’t really understand that this had happened in Corrientes. I thought it had happened in our backyard. My grandmother probably assumed I’d understood this happened in a place miles away, but I didn’t make that connection in my head. So, every time it rained, I was expecting the girl to cry. That’s the truth. I would listen. And later as an adult, when I started thinking about that story a lot, I said to myself, ‘What if my childhood belief was true? What if the bones really were there? What if I unburied them? What if they were then covered up again? What if the house was sold?’

The stench of the Riachuelo River, the decaying streets, the derelict houses, the thieving kids and drug addicts, the noise, the reverberations, the smells, this city ‘like a living nightmare’ (‘Under The Black Water’), Buenos Aires is perhaps the great character in many of your most powerful stories.

Can you talk about the depiction of Buenos Aires in your work?

It’s specifically the south of Buenos Aires, for Buenos Aires is massive and has a lot of personalities. The personality I relate to most is the south. It’s the place I know best. When I moved from Lanús, I lived there in the city’s south, which is crossed by the Riachuelo River. A natural frontier that is now completely unnatural because it is polluted beyond recognition. The rest of central Buenos Aires is different – richer – because obviously the people who can don’t want to live near that pollution and all the polluting industries, which are basically related to meat. The south, then, becomes a great metaphor for what makes the country rich and horrendous at the same time. Or what fucked it up.

Amazingly, too, these neighbourhoods used to be the place where the rich lived in the nineteenth century, but it’s now full of their decaying piles – San Telmo, Monserrat, San Nicolás and Constitución, for example, which features, in my story ‘The Dirty Kid’. The rich fled from these districts because of the Yellow Fever epidemic in the 1870s, and moved a long way north to places like Olivos, abandoning the south for their servants to die in and poor migrants, too. As a character, that place, the south, is brilliant for the things I write about. It has a lot of tragedy and abandonment. It is steeped in memory. It is a real southern gothic kind of place. And it hasn’t recovered. History is visible. One of the mansions I especially love is now a hospital for the Rehabilitation of the Respiratory Impaired, which is completely Dickensian!

In your stories, there is another frequent presence – let’s call her La Enriquez – she might be a social worker as in ‘Kids Who Come Back’, or a lawyer as in ‘Under The Black Water’. This porteña is tough, but often sensitive, with a social conscience, though things don’t always work out for her.

Who is she? Where does she come from? How does she relate to Mariana Enriquez?

She’s a bit of a mask I wear in exploring the disillusionment with the ideals of the left. Nobody ever really asks me about this. But to me it’s obvious. In, for example, ‘The Dirty Kid’, there is clearly a character who is ideologically in the right place, on the right side of history, let’s say, and yet she is completely useless. How is she in the right place? She tries to help the child; she thinks it’s a scandal that this child is on the street, and that the mother is a pregnant woman who’s an addict. She’s very upset. But, at the same time, all these ‘do-good’ intentions kind of crash. And I suppose it’s because I see in many people, who have their minds in ‘the right place’, a lot of self-righteousness. Often, they don’t really do anything. They just proclaim – incidentally, I include myself here. They proclaim. It’s all discourse, talk. ‘This is wrong, and that is right, and blah blah blah.’ But they take no practical steps, and yet still they feel this superiority. And I find it horrendous. This, I think, is one of the reasons why the left, the progressive side of politics, is losing the game right now – because of this attitude, which I have, too. And I try to work with that in my fiction. And that’s why many of the characters are people dealing with social issues. For example, the lawyer in ‘Under The Black Water’ who thinks she understands the monstrosity brooding in the Villa Moreno slum, thinks she can handle it, and it ends up a total disaster.

In your first two collections – The Dangers of Smoking In Bed and Things We Lost in The Fire – ambiguity often plays a key role, or the supernatural is merely suggested. In ‘Spiderweb’, for instance, it is unclear what happens to the objectionable husband. In ‘The Well’ it reads initially as though Josefina is a child suffering from mental health issues.

In your latest collection, A Sunny Place for Shady People, the tales are more clearly forays into the supernatural. What explains the shift?

I started to find that working with ambiguity was growing gimmicky – partly this was technical, and partly a matter of a device becoming boring to me as an author. ‘Here we go: I’m working with ambiguity again.’ There were stories that I wrote that were not published, as a result. At the same time, though, I found myself beginning to trust the supernatural as it is, to a greater extent. As a tool and as a narrative force that doesn’t need to be doubted. ‘Is it the supernatural, or is it not?’ No! – that’s finished. The supernatural is now the reality; the supernatural is the literary pact made with the reader. And I wanted to veer from the metaphorical use of the supernatural, as well. Instead, in my third collection, the supernatural is accepted on its own terms.

This change in my writing, I think, followed the publication of my novel, Our Share of Night, where the horror that occurs, the descent into the nightmare of those who feed on the living, is conceived as totally real. The stories that came after in A Sunny Shade for Shady People were written, then, in a similar vein, though I will admit that with some of my earlier stories, such as ‘Spiderweb’, the ambiguity did work very well. But that cannot be accomplished all the time.

Who are some of the Argentine and Latin American authors that you like to read and why?

First, Manuel Puig. He was a gay writer, very influenced by cinema, pop culture and politics. Of course Kiss of the Spider Woman is popular, but he has many other fine works, though he is treated as a one-hit wonder in the Anglo world. I’d especially highlight The Buenos Aires Affair, from the early seventies. That novel is astonishing – short, tough, super sexy – and it anticipates the dictatorship.

Another very interesting author is Laura Alcoba, who writes in French. She lives in Paris, and is the daughter of two survivors of the Argentine dictatorship. An interesting part of the Latin American literature happening now is being written in exile, and Laura Alcoba is for me the best example. She wrote a trilogy about the clandestine situation she was in with her parents, when they were part of a revolutionary army, to the point of the family’s departure from Argentina. She is my age and the work is exceptional, written in the present tense about this charged historical situation. Immensely powerful, though lean, the first book is called The Rabbit House.

A third is the Cuban, Elaine Vilar Madruga. She is the opposite of Alcoba. Her works are lush, baroque, gothic – they traverse the jungle, families, the bodies of women, and she is highly political without seeming to be political at all. Hers is an exploration of Caribbean madness: What The Forest Devours, for example, is brilliant.

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Mariana Enriquez was born in Argentina, in 1973. She is the author of the novel Our Share of Night – winner of the Herralde Prize – the collections of short fiction Things We Lost in Fire, A Sunny Place or Shady People – World Fantasy Award Winner – and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed – shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her most recent work is the nonfiction book Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave. In Spanish, she has about eight books yet to be translated, including Archipielago, an essay on reading, and La hermana menor, a profile of Argentinian writer Silvina Ocampo. She was awarded the Premio Iberoamericano de Letras José Donoso in 2024.

Konrad Muller’s debut novel My Heart At Evening has been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

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