"The Dangers of Smoking in Bed" by Mariana Enriquez

It's easy to remember many of the classic campfire scary stories told in my youth: the woman driving alone on a rainy night, unaware of the killer in her backseat; the babysitter who calls caller ID after receiving crank calls, only to learn the calls were coming from inside the house! Last summer, I kept a group of kids enthralled as I recounted the "tale of the bloody finger" over a crackling fire. We love scary stories, ghost stories, stories that end unsettled, as if the lack of equilibrium in the world could catch us too. But there's also a sense that these are stories for children. Adult scares come in the form of medical tragedies, unexpected expenses, or the inevitable ennui of middle age.

It's a surprise, then, to read The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, which I'd call--with no criticism intended--a collection of scary stories. Sure, they're literary scary stories, but they're campfire tales all the same, full of ghosts and possessions and creepy children. Shortened and simplified for an oral audience, the stories--particularly ones like "The Lookout," about a vengeful ghost--would be ideal for a group gathered around the fire on a dark fall night.

Because the stories have so much in common with traditional ghost stories--a normal world, slowly going askew; characters succumbing to the terror that lurks--it was almost hard for me to read them as literature. Traditional ghost stories often have a vaguely moralistic lesson (don't ignore the man at the gas station because he looks creepy! he's warning you about the murderer in the backseat!), but Enriquez has no such didactic purposes. Her characters are rarely at fault themselves. Instead, they're victims of family history and choices or the society in which they live. Few stories are overtly political, though the final one, "Back When We Talked to the Dead," where a teenage girl suffers because she's the only one in a group not to personally know someone who's been "disappeared" (presumably by the government), suggests there's plenty of evil that comes from non-supernatural causes.

Perhaps part of the stories' appeal, at least for an American reader, is the Argentinian setting, itself similar but just slightly "askew" from America. Smoking, as in the title, is present in many stories, an ashy haze that seems appropriate for the subject matter. But because smoking is far more common in Argentina (as it also is in Europe) than in America, this too feels slightly off, another element that situates the stories of the precipice of unreal. 

Several stories include variations of vicious female masturbation, done for obsessiveness or other macabre ends, but never for pleasure. This appears most grotesquely in "Where Are You, Dear Heart?" about a woman with a heartbeat fetish--or maybe in "Meat," about teenage girls who consume their rock star idol. In fact, so many stories revolve around teenage girls or female sexuality that we're reminded how easily these two things can be turned to horror in our society, something to be feared.

Ultimately, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is literary ghost stories for adults. And that's not a bad thing.