Published 2/17. New York/London: Hogarth. Translated by Megan McDowell. 202 Pages.

Though the terms are often used interchangeably, or as a compound—Gothic Horror—in their primeval essences Gothic fiction and Horror fiction can be said to have as much to do with each other as classic and modern Country music. Modern Country, like Modern Horror, is a literal, unpretentious genre: we’re from the American South, we sing how we talk, and primarily about the subjects—beer, trucks, and women—nearest at hand. (This is a cruel generalization, marshalled in service to a tenuous comparison, and I deserve the coming fusillade of fine counterexamples from readers who love Country.)  Likewise, Modern Horror is very literally about monsters and murderers doing monstrous and murderous things. It chases (whatever It happens to be), and Its prey alternately hides or runs away.

Not so straightforward are the classical forms of these two genres. Classic country, like classic horror, concerns itself with creating an atmosphere, in classic country one of nostalgia and rusticity, in the latter case (which is the hunk of this comparison I really want to tear off and chew) one of concern, worry, dread. The subtle difference between Horror and Gothic corresponds to the difference between fear and dread. Fear is immediate and direct: I am being chased by a man in a mask. Dread is subterranean: it afflicts us even when we are happy and would seem to have nothing to worry about. It manifests (at least at first) not in literal monsters but in the bare hint of monstrosity lurking beneath the surface of society or of human consciousness. In the earliest Gothic fiction, this took the form of Popish plots, secret cabals, lecherous cardinals, and ghostly nuns.

In the modern Gothic short story, very different evils lurk. We live in a more macabre time, with at least more of an imagination for violence. Though literal monsters do now and then turn up in Things We Lost in the Fire, Argentinian author and editor Mariana Enriquez’s debut collection of stories in English, these are often less fear-inducing than the private neuroses that afflict her main characters. Take the main character of “Dirty Boy,” who prides herself on her ability to stick it out in her family’s old manor house even as the neighborhood goes to the dogs, and there are death cults and homeless people and drug traffickers all around, and her family and friends beg her to leave.

I like the neighborhood. No one understands why, but I do: it makes me feel sharp and audacious, on my toes.

But does the main character really belong here? She puts on a bold face, but when she encounters a homeless boy and his drug-addict mother sleeping on a cardboard box across the street, Lala, a transvestite hairdresser who shares the house with our protagonist, warns that she heard a rumour that the mother goes to witches’ sabbaths. (And Lala, who worships Pompa Gira, a personal spirit “who looks like a demonic woman, with horns and a trident,” would presumably be in a position to know.) In any case, when the main character scorns the idea of witches, Lala tells her, “What do you know about what really goes on around here, mamacita? You live here, but you’re from a different world.” Touche, our protagonist thinks, inwardly agreeing that she is a “middle class woman who thinks she’s a rebel because she chose to live in the most dangerous neighborhood of Buenos Aires.”

This is not to say, however, that first-world problems have subsumed all actual danger. Maria Enriquez’s stories visit the darkest, dankest corners of modern Buenos Aires, villa miserias they are called, places where the wealthy avoid even passing through in fear for their lives. Both “The Dirty Kid” and the later story “Under the Black Water” explore the horror which middle class point-of-view characters find when they venture into these urban jungles full of sinister deities and ruthless narcos. These stories play with the class consciousness of their main characters, such as when the titular Dirty Kid’s mother disappears, and the narrator feeds the boy and buys him ice cream but is later wracked with guilt when the news reports of a missing little boy who appears to have been the victim of a chilling ritualistic murder. Why didn’t I buy him shoes? she asks herself. Why didn’t I call the police, or give him over to social services? But this guilt is finally reconciled in her mind when it turns out the murdered boy is not the one she met with. (Happy coincidence!) Moreover, the boy’s disappearance is nothing abnormal:

Their parents change neighborhoods and take them along. They join groups of child thieves or windshield washers on the avenue, or they become drug mules.

This whole paragraph divining the boy’s possible fate progresses to less and less dark ones, until the protagonist reassuring tells herself that the boy will end up living on a dirt road with some distant uncle who turns up out of nowhere to rescue him. Everything will be fine: little boys aren’t being murdered in the streets, or not this one, anyway. The story illustrates how middle class people like the main character feel both guilt about the condition of the lower class and dread of their supposed primitiveness, of the cruel state of nature perceived on the edge of middle-class society. (Enriquez notably wrote a biography of Silvina Ocampo, another Argentinian author known for the element of cruelty in her fiction.) It is this primitive state of nature that replaces the functions performed by ghostly nuns and Popish plots in the traditional Gothic story. (Appropriately, the prosecutor gathering evidence in the slums of Buenos Aires in “Under the Black Water,” does actually arrive to find a demented priest making sacrifices to his cow god.)

Disinhibition, a breaking of social norms is the common theme that ties together most of the stories in Things We Lost in the Fire, the hidden monster that lurks. Each of these stories show how some disinhibited aspect of society creates a disquieting effect. Violence against children is one taboo threaded through multiple stories in the collection, which is notable because it is an especially abhorred phenomenon. The molestation of children was an international scandal for the Catholic church and the Penn State football team alike. The mass shooting at Sandy Hook was viewed as worse than other mass shootings with similar casualty numbers since the victims were primarily children. On a more individual level, even childless people feel a hallowed duty to protect children, and the failure to protect them can result in a calamitous sense of guilt. Enriquez presents one example in the story “The Dirty Boy,” but this guilt also plays a large role in the story, “The Neighbor’s Courtyard,” where the protagonist’s guilt about a past failure when put in charge of children seems to be driving her insane. (Though part of the dread of insanity is that an insane person cannot tell if they are insane or not. The most unreliable of narrators is the one who is not reliably unreliable; we find ourselves toeing a borderline between reality and irreality, sanity and insanity, that is the essence of Gothic dread.) One of the most brilliant things about “The Neighbor’s Courtyard” is how, before this dread makes its appearance in the story, the couple at the center of the story seem to have entered into a perfectly blissful domestic situation in a lovely new house in a good neighborhood. As in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the whole situation is arguably manufactured completely out of the main character’s sense of dread.

The story “An Invocation of the Big-Eared Runt,” meanwhile, raises the taboo of violence against children in relation to the question of appreciation, or fandom, of things macabre. The main character, Pablo, is a tour guide on the most popular bus tour of Buenos Aires, “the murder tour.” Pablo acts as narrating guide as the tour group views the sites of murders by the ten most notorious local serial killers. Pablo’s favorite serial killer—because doesn’t creating a Top Ten List of murderers already imply a preference, an aesthetic taste, if you will, for certain murders?—was known as the Runt, a dumb adolescent with an insatiable knack for killing small children. The oddness of liking murders does not go uncommented on by Enriquez:

Poor Reina Bonita’s murder wasn’t Pablo’s favorite crime. He liked—because that was the word, what can you do?—the murder of Jesualdo Giordano, three years old.

Pablo’s predilection is especially disliked by his pregnant wife. Nothing sinister happens within the confines of the story itself, and yet, there is something chilling about how Pablo contemplates the nail he was going to use to hang a mobile for the baby, and how he will now use it as a prop on his tour bus to depict how the Runt murdered a toddler. He sees nothing untoward or disquietingly symmetrical about his fixation with death, particularly the gruesome deaths of children, and how disinhibited he feels in discussing this subject with his pregnant wife.

One may wonder in turn if Enriquez’s repeated depictions of violence against children are gratuitous and themselves disinhibiting, though I doubt she’ll find much of an audience among mass murderers. And really, are her stories any more gratuitous than the reality that they depict? Disinhibition is arguably the theme of our present situation in the United States, from our gain-seeking politics to our fear-driven workplaces to our sick entrapment by the gun industry. One of the most high-profile recent manifestation of the fixation with the macabre is the argument over mass gun ownership—the 3% of Americans who are stockpiling upwards of 15 firearms in their personal armories. It can be difficult to recall that the machine gun was invented for the purpose of mowing down large groups of enemies charging across a field, but we are now at a point where we’ve dignified owning dozens of these things, to the point that a man can move 23 guns into a Las Vegas hotel room and attract no scrutiny whatsoever.

But putting this into a smaller context, I find such questions enter into my own mind when I’m reading The World’s Worst Criminals or about serial killers on Wikipedia. At what point does an enthusiasm or enjoyment for reading about the the macabre begin to change how we think, to coarsen our minds, to make mass murder more easy for a Stephen Paddock to even contemplate? Ever since Tolstoy’s What is Art? there has been a debate about the relationship of art to morality, with most critics falling into the camp that says there is no relationship between morality and artistic merit. My view is that art can be artistic without being moral, but it seldom happens, since the same virtues that make a work artistic tend also to make it moral. The morality of art extends to the affective capacity we exercise when we learn how to “read” and appreciate art, and it is in this that such seeming counter examples as a Jackson Pollock or Piet Mondrian painting are also rendered moral artworks. Moreover, even when art is used in an act of evil, it is not the evil components of that act which are the artful ones. So in De Quincey it is the form, arrangement and creativity of a murder, not the hatred, malice, or the mere fact of death, that makes a murder artful.

The most anarchic—which is to say, disinhibiting—story in the collection is the title story in which a group of women rise up to protest men’s mistreatment and objectification of women by . . . setting themselves on fire. It’s an insane premise, but one Enriquez uses to highlight the insane circumstances that make it plausible.