The Argentine writer Mariana Enriquez, who publishes Conversations with Darkness, has stated that she does not dare to say where her “obsession” with horror comes from, though she has ventured that it “perhaps” stems from the impossibility of being able to see ghosts, something she, she acknowledges, would love to experience.
In her latest book, which carries the subtitle “Theories, intuitions and writing of fear”, she lays out a personal cartography of contemporary horror and of her own writing, always from her generational and Latin American perspective.
“I think everything begins in childhood and with Guaraní myths. That, added to Greek mythology, especially everything related to monstrosities,” she explained at a press conference, for whom in her region the relationship with the dead and stories of ghosts is something “natural” and “incorporated into daily life. I have a very unprejudiced relationship with horror. I do not have the luck to see ghosts like my aunt. Perhaps that is where this obsession comes from, because it fascinates me greatly and I can explore it, both in theory and in fiction, but not personally.”
Efe / Marta Pérez
In Conversations with Darkness, Enriquez also addresses her view of the genre regarding Latin America, a place where Gothic does not necessarily pass through castles and other elements of the European historical imagination. It is a distinct terror, native to the region where she was born, that also feeds on myths and local folklore, among other more universal references. “Gothic is a genre that, to tell certain persistence of the memory of Latin America, certain violences and narratives of those indigenous peoples who, at the time, were suppressed, can be very useful”.
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Source: Efe.