A Sunny Place for Shady People (2024) by Mariana Enriquez

 Audiobook Review

A Sunny Place for Shady People (2024)

by Mariana  Enriquez

Translated by Megan McDowell

  I straight up loved Our Share of Night, the multi-generational novel about a group of Satanists operating in the UK and Argentina.  I'm by no means a fan of the horror genre, but Enriquez really nailed the cruelty of a fictional satanic cult and I still think about some of the scenes on a regular basis as an example of what good writing means to me- and just to think that this is a writer who has her words translated into English from Spanish.  I've more or less decided that for books within the close Indo-European sphere: English, Spanish, French, German the idea of losing meaning/beauty in the translation from one closely related language to another is overblown except on a poetic level. 

  Going in I knew that this volume of short stories wouldn't match her novel, but I still enjoyed this collection.  The title story, in particular, combines the elements of her style:  A spooky, LA-based story about an Argentinian journalist who convinces her editor to let her travel to  Los Angeles to do a story on the cultish group that has sprung up around the memory of Elisa Lam, a 21 year old Canadian student who died under extremely mysterious circumstances inside the Water Tower of the Cecil Hotel.  While in Los Angeles, she is forced to confront the memory of her dead lover who lost himself to schizophrenia and heroin and reconnecting with a lesbian couple who live in the Hollywood hill.   Most of the other stories are set either in Argentina or in an Argentina-like place and have similar but different combinations of spooks and personal issues.   Mostly, though, this collection was just a reminder for me about how much I loved Our Share of Night.