Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez is a book of liminalities. Mixing horror with magical realism and history, Enriquez takes readers on a journey through the lives of women living in Argentina in the form of exhilarating and entirely enchanting short stories.

From ghosts to drugs, haunted houses, to murder, Enriquez melds together the real terrors of life under dictatorship and oppression with the most horrifically imaginable terrors a mind could muster. Each of the story’s main character is a female who is experiencing some sort of liminal space. For many this is space is the entire crux of the story. A woman torn between two places, two ideas, two people, and often torn to, potentially, the point of death.

In the book’s opening story, “The Dirty Kid,” the main character is a middle class woman choosing to live in a slum. The woman finds that the homeless child who lives on her corner might have been murdered, and she might be the only one able to identify him. Caught between issues of class, police corruption, and her moral gut, the main character can’t seem to act.

Similarly, in “Green Red Orange,” the estranged girlfriend of an internet addicted depressive finds herself caught between her boyfriend’s mother, her desire to give up on the man she once loved who now won’t come out of his bedroom, and, once again she is left with an inability to act.

Each of the women in Enriquez’s stories are faced with more than just challenges, they are faced with near impossible decisions. While the reader often doesn’t end up seeing the actions that the characters take, Enriquez leaves every story at a cliffhanger, begging the reader to write her own ending.

Published in February of 2017 by Hogarth Publishing, Things We Lost in the Fire is available for purchase at your local bookstore.

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FTC Disclaimer: This book was given to me in return for a fair and honest review of the text.