Through the Night Like a Snake (Two Lines Press, 2024) is a horror anthology that isn’t afraid to turn away from tropes of the genre in favor of a more vivid—though still terrifying—picture of modern life in Latin America. While certain stories flirt with the supernatural and gothic traditions, the best of the bunch offer a brand of horror that does away with allegory, pulling down the curtain and revealing the proximity between real life and terror. Equally, these stories are marked by a commitment to representing the often neglected misfortunes of womanhood. From travestis—a Latin American term used to describe males who adopt female identities—and abandoned old ladies to battles with infertility, the contributors—writers and translators both, the majority of whom are women—are keen to shine a light on women who are not often literature’s favorite subject.
Mariana Enriquez’s fiction is indelibly marked by Argentina’s violent history, and “That Summer in the Dark” is no exception. Set in the Buenos Aires province of Las Torres, the story follows two teenage girls—our nameless narrator and her friend Virginia—navigating their way through the summer of 1989 and government instated rolling blackouts. In an Argentina already suffering from inflation and food shortages, the dawn of Menem’s government and his waves of privatization only exacerbated the strain on the nation. While her fiction is often placed in the Latin American Gothic tradition, in this story the horror is firmly rooted in the real world.
The summer expands in front of them, and their future disappears. The cheap housing they are cooped up in becomes even less glamorous during the blackouts:
“Buildings of more than fifteen floors with very thin walls that let all kinds of sounds through: shouts, moans of pleasure, fights, crying babies, musical instruments. All the apartments were the same…There was an unintended consequence to having the kitchens so close to the front doors: the hallways always smelled of food…it was awful, nauseating, when the smell floating in the air was from fried food, fish, boiled cauliflower, even grilled meat, which smells delicious at first but starts to have a whiff of rot once it stagnates.”
That summer, the girls find an unlikely means of distraction in the form of a book of serial killers. Soon enough, an even greater distraction comes along when a seemingly innocuous neighbor murders his wife and daughter. This should be enough to tip the other tenants over the edge, and yet our narrator describes the effect of the murders as follows:
“The crime did us all good. The four hours of nightly TV were dedicated entirely to Carrasco and his murdered family. When the transmission ended, the expectation and anticipation of finding out more details of the case the next day helped us get through the night. Helped us forget…”
Perversely, it is a cause for optimism, the rebirth of the future they had all lost earlier. Most importantly, the murders constitute a distraction from their reality. The girls’ days are already filled with misery: cooped up in a claustrophobic apartment building, or in a convenience store with ever changing prices, while their favorite cashier is dying of AIDS, the TV reports and their obsession with serial killers are a means of escapism from their grim reality:
“Wasn’t there enough death as it was? [Their parents] asked, referring to the dictatorship and torturers; they didn’t understand that Virginia and I were into a different sort of hell, an unreal, noisy inferno of masks and chainsaws…heads stored in the freezer.”
For our narrator and Virginia, the state of living in a Buenos Aires province under Menem’s government means living in perpetual discomfort and uncertainty. They have swallowed the horror of their lives, and their proximity has only served to dull it. Pining for more exceptional horrors—there was no such thing as an Argentinian serial killer at the time, according to the government—in Carrasco and their book of killers, the girls find a hell they can be proud of.
In Mónica Ojeda’s—another leading figure of the Latin American Gothic subgenre—story, “Soroche,” horror is again grounded in a bleak reality, rather than by means of supernatural intrusion. Written entirely in direct address, the story follows a group of friends discussing a recent trip to the Andean mountains. The trip’s purpose is to distract their childhood friend Ana from the revenge porn an ex-boyfriend had recently leaked. Superficially, they are all behind her, but the confessional mode of direct address soon reveal that Ana’s friends are more interested in victim blaming than chastising the guilty party: badly out of shape and unintelligent, Ana is described as the prime candidate of revenge porn: “if she’d listened to me, at least she would’ve looked different in the video…which is what matters.” Ana’s trauma is used as a means to affirm the others’ worldviews, and they all but admit she has become a monster to them. It is a particularly nasty situation, one that represents an anxiety which undoubtedly plays on the mind of anyone unfortunate to be a victim of revenge porn: no one will ever look at me in the same way again.
Despite her friends’ best efforts, Ana knows better than anyone how awful she looked in that video, and her description of it is the anthology’s most brutal passage:
“My fat thighs, wrinkled with peaks and craters like an orange peel…my fingers making circles on my clitoris thinking I’m sexy when clearly, obviously, definitively, I am not…my purple teats…my tits like two rotting eggplants…my bovine expression…my sumo wrestler body…the ridiculous movements I make when I think I look sexy…about how I am…the most vomitous person on the planet…about my children’s faces when they look at me…about the nausea they all surely feel at the sight of me…my blubber smacking against his hard, athletic body…about how he doesn’t cum and loses his erection…him shoving his fist into my vagina, letting in air and releasing a queef…about just how long a two-minute-and-thirty-second video can be…about how ugliness always wins.”
These are the frantic, relentless thoughts of a broken woman. Ana knows that both for herself and others, she has transformed forever more. People have seen her at her most intimate and her ugliest. It has changed her against her will.
Toward the end of the story, the girls give conflicting accounts of a vision they have on the mountain. Whether it is an animal they are unfamiliar with, a demon, or just a product of their altitude sickness ultimately doesn’t matter. The supernatural intrusion Ojeda flirts with here is ultimately ineffective. The excessive details Ana gives, as well her friends’ confessions, beat the reader down long before any symbolic creature reveals itself. As with Enriquez’s story, perhaps this diversion at the end of “Soroche” is a means of turning to a different sort of hell, one that is not so vivid and close to home.
In “Professor Nobody’s Little Lectures,” Thomas Ligotti frames the supernatural as a means to bridge the gap between fiction and reality, the latter always winning out “for vividness of pain and lasting effects of fear.” Replacing the natural with the supernatural, ‘‘we find the strength to…savor and suffer [horror] at the same time.” With these stories, we aren’t afforded this buffer, and are left craving the supernatural to distance ourselves.
Besides its direct and true-to-life spin on the horror genre, Through the Night Like a Snake also stands out for championing women writers and experiences that do not always get airtime. Giovanna Rivero’s “The Man with the Leg” follows a woman struggling to get pregnant. She is prescribed a “pregnancy elixir” that leaves her feeling like “a cow in the green pasture.” While her attempted pregnancy keeps her occupied, one thought reoccurs above all: the “rotting dog” of a man with a gangrenous leg she had spotted on the subway, who “reeks of the unstoppable advances of death” and cannot afford to get it amputated. He invades her dreams, and she begins to develop and obsession with his rotting leg. Unable to get pregnant without artificial assistance, perhaps she sees something of herself in the man with the leg; another person whose body has refused to play the natural game of life, another outsider to the natural order.
Compared to the protagonist of “The Man with the Leg,” “The Visitor” deals with the polar opposite end of motherhood. Long abandoned by her son, an old woman is given a second chance at exercising her maternal instinct, which is far from worn out; a mute alien crash lands outside her house, and she takes him in. Her “tranquil existence has been covered in a sinister cloak,” but she decides to make the best out of her new surrogate child, eerily reminiscent to her son’s old Kermit the Frog doll. Despite its blatant lack of affection and her suspicions that the creature is sucking the life out of her, the old lady feels blessed to have become a mother again; you finish the story with the impression that exercising her maternal instinct again was the only thing keeping her alive.
Each of these stories present a distorted and pernicious picture of motherhood, in which a woman’s most primordial biological function becomes perverse; for the budding mother, a child feels a million miles off. While a newborn usually conjures up images of life and growth, here it is analogous to a rotting limb. Between the budding mother and the lonely old woman with only her routines for company, we’re presented with a pair of women left behind by the world.
Camila Sosa Villada’s “The House of Compassion” moves on from the woes of motherhood toward a concern which emerges in almost all of her work: the relentless suffering of travestis. The travesti of this story is sex worker Flor de Ceibo. Named after the national flower of Argentina—a nod to the historical abuses against travestis throughout Latin American history—the story follows her attempting to rob her clients, and eventual involvement in a convent-cum-dog-sanctuary that has some involvement in car crashes in the winding roads of the Pampas. Flor de Ceibo is a divided self, often having conversations with her other half: “there aren’t many other people with whom she can have such sincere, entertaining conversations.” What appears to be a third person narrator—“Now we see Flor de Ceibo coming out of the bathroom…Flor de Ceibo at work”—may in fact be that other part of her, that part that doesn’t wear makeup or dresses, looking down on her travesti self, detached. Despite the many metamorphoses that are at the heart of this story, Flor de Ceibo is aware that any change in her nature can only amount to “a change in the nature of her suffering.”
Through the Night Like a Snake establishes a set of central tenets of the burgeoning Latin American Horror genre: a commitment to the voices of marginalized women, an often overt drawing from a bloody history, and a mode of horror that turns away from supernatural traditions and towards realistic anxieties from modern life. However, the stories here are not exhausted by the above criteria; certain inclusions slither into uncharted territories that are seemingly Ibero-American only by coincidence. Latin American Literature in translation is—Post-Boom—as popular as it has ever been, and the fact that this Aleph-like collection exists is testament to the recent successes of this emerging genre.
